


D.S.S. Requirement

by esama



Series: Wizards IN SPACE [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Stargate - All Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dumbledore's Army, Gen, IN SPACE!, Science Fiction, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-14 13:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3412346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dumbledore's Army use the Room of the Requirement to get themselves a spaceship.</p><p>(Knowledge about Stargate is not necessary to read this story)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Proofread by Darlene  
> Disclaimer on all science. I don't science. Science will probably be wrong. Please ignore all science.

Harry was usually the first at the Room of Requirement, whenever they had a D.A. session. There wasn't that much to do before hand – Harry didn't exactly have lesson plans, and most of the things he taught could be taught on the fly, sort of. But he was the one who knew what was needed for each session, so he was the one who needed to set up the Room.

That day he was much earlier than usual, though. He had vague plans to go over some basic attack spells in their next meeting and wanted to see if the Room could provide a variety of attack dummies to use. It just would be safer that way, rather than using spells on each other in practice like they'd done with the expelliarmus and the other less destructive spells. The whole jig would be up if a number of their members had to go to the hospital wing with cuts and bruises, after all.

He wasn't the first there that day, though. As he approached the seventh floor corridor, Fred was not so casually leaning onto the corner leading to the left hand side, with a book held upside down in his hand – obviously keeping watch.

"Morning, Fred," Harry said at the sight of him, slowing his steps cautiously. A Weasley Twin keeping watch was rarely a good thing.

Fred gave him a look which was just on the side of disappointment. "Oh. Wotcher, Harry. Didn't think anyone was going to come in yet," he said and closed the book.

"What are you doing?" Harry asked, craning his neck to see if he could spot George.

"Oh. Well. Nothing much – just mucking about a bit," Fred answered, giving his book a look and the shoving it into his book bag. "Guess we can do it later, if you're going to start the session early."

"Hm," Harry answered noncommittally and stepped past him. It wasn't just George in the corridor past Fred, but Lee Jordan – and it was Lee who was pacing the front of the secret entrance to the Room. His face was scrunched up in concentration and he was actually massaging his temples with his fingers as he tried to make the Room appear.

"Oh," George said as he saw Harry. "Bummer."

"Hi, George. Lee," Harry said and just barely smothered the urge to put his hands to his hips and tap his foot. "What are you guys doing?"

"Nothing bad?" George offered hopefully. "Just testing the Room a bit, is all. All the stuff it can turn into, and… stuff. We've checked that no one's about and everything. And we were going to reset it afterwards."

"Testing the Room," Harry repeated slowly.

"Well. Yeah. I mean, come on, everyone wants to test the place, see what it can do," George said. "Don't tell me you haven't been tempted."

"Well, no I haven't. I already have the Room turning into what I need," Harry said, arching an eyebrow. "What else would I need for it to turn into, except for the practice room?"

"Oh ye of little imagination," Fred said, clapping Harry on the shoulder. "You should broaden your mind a bit. We've so far gotten to experience a water park and a ginger bread house and we've even managed to make a room that was all upwards-down and everything."

"And that one time, we made an ice room and skated inside it, it was pretty cool," George added. "And the Room can get as big as you want – we had a broom race the other day."

"How long have you been at this?" Harry asked with something akin to dismay. Not that he minded them having fun, exactly. It was just that the secrecy of the room was what kept D.A. safe, and if they played around in it – hanging about the entrance like this… they were pretty much bound to get caught.

"Well… a couple of days, not that long," Fred said sheepishly. "It's just a spot of fun, really – no harm done. Plus the room makes a great place to experiment with our, ahem… products."

Harry sighed and shook his head. "So what are you trying to turn it into now?" he asked, glancing at Lee – who'd gone a fourth circuit now, and managed to effect no change in the hidden entrance.

"Lee wanted to try something _special_ ," George shrugged. "Won't say what – seems to be having trouble there, our old Lee."

"Me thinks his mental mind powers aren't good enough," Fred agreed.

"Shut up, mate, I'm trying to concentrate here," Lee answered, frowning so hard it looked like he was in actual physical pain.

Harry looked at him and then at the twins who were looking between him and Lee expectantly – either waiting for him to tell them to quit it and get out of the way, or for Lee to succeed. Then he sighed and stepped forward, ignoring Lee and walking past the door three times, thinking _just give Lee what he wants so that we can get on with this_ at it until a door popped into the wall. Except it wasn't quite a door.

"Success!" Lee cried in triumph at the sight of the oval shaped metal slab that now stood in the wall.

"What?" Harry asked, his question echoed by a confused George and Fred at each of his sides.

Lee ignored them all and stepped forward – and in reaction, the metal slab split diagonally in the middle, the two halves sliding into the frames and revealing a dark space beyond. As Harry and the twins shared looks of confusion, Lee stepped inside, taking out a wand and casting a lumos to illuminate the dark space beyond the strange door.

And then Harry promptly realised what Lee had made. "No way," he muttered and whipped out his wand too, following Lee inside. "No _way_ ," he said again, as he saw the interior. It was all smooth metal – a sort of vaulted corridor, triangular in shape, with glowing ancient runes on the walls. Lee was already going ahead, further down the strange polished corridor, and Harry hurried after him and into the open space beyond.

"No way," he said again pointedly, as he saw what was beyond – across the large hall, past the odd tables and glass screens, there was a window. An enormous floor to ceiling window, with dark, empty space beyond it. Except it wasn't dark, not quite.

It was lit by thousands of stars.

"Lee," Harry said, turning to him. " _No way_."

"Way," Lee answered, grinning as he hurried to the window and reached out to touch it, to lean forward and look around – only to quickly yank his hand back when the window proved not to be glass after all, but energy. It sparked at him like electricity and hissing the dark skinned wizard shook his hand. "Oh, that is so wicked," he murmured, starting at the window as it if hadn't just electrocuted him.

"How in the…?" Harry asked, also coming forward. It was nothing but dark, star speckled space outside – no, not quite. There was a shadow below them, far below them, hanging like a spot of black void that blocked out the star light. An object, not quite circular in shape. "Is that an _asteroid_?"

"Where?" Lee asked and then grinned as he saw it. "Oh this is _so_ cool!"

"Ahem," George said behind them. "Could you two share with the class? What is this place?"

Harry and Lee turned to look at them and then they shared a look. "Poor, poor, scifi-deficient purebloods," Lee shrugged sympathetically and turned to face the twins. "You, my dear, dear friends, are on a _spaceship_!" he announced grandly, spreading his hands. "Welcome!"

"Huh?" Fred and George asked in unison. "We're on a _what_?"

"On a spaceship. On _space_. Or in space," Lee said excitedly, almost giddily, and tried to haphazardly explain what it meant. "See, I told you Muggles went into space, right? They went to the moon and everything, on these ships that flew by rockets and stuff? Well, they have this genre of fiction called science fiction which is mostly about space and stuff and …"

Harry shook his head and leaned back to look at the window, and the asteroid below them. His mind was catching up with him, now, and the little boy excitement was fading away. Of course it wasn't actually _real_. It was just the Room of Requirement making what Lee had wanted to see – and as it was, it was hardly realistic. Not that he'd ever been any particular reader of science fiction, but even he knew what actual spaceships were like, on the inside. They were awkward and cramped and they didn't have gravity like normal every day Earth did. Nothing like this enormous vaulted space, open and grandiose.

The place was probably a copy of some spaceship Lee had seen on a scifi show on a telly or something. It didn't make it any less cool, granted, but it did give him a bit of a reality check.

"Okay. So," George said, arms folded. "This isn't actually a place, but a… ship. In space."

"I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to be able to live in space," Fred said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "Pretty sure there's no air."

"Obviously the spaceship has its own atmosphere inside it and its made air tight so it doesn't get out – use your imagination a bit, guys," Lee said superiorly.

"Why aren't we floating about?" Fred asked.

"Artificial gravity. Like reverse a levitation charm, but technological."

"Muggles can do that?" George asked, fascinated.

"Well. No. But you know," Lee motioned around. "It's not like this place is actually real, or made by muggles or anything."

"So it's… not a spaceship?" Fred asked suspiciously.

"It's a _fake_ ship," George said accusingly.

"It's not a fakeship, you prat. It _is_ a spaceship, just… not a real one. A scifi spaceship," Lee made a face at them. "Come on guys, stop spoiling this for me. Back me up here, Harry."

"Hm?" Harry asked. "Oh, yes. This is very cool," he said obligingly. "Is it from a series or something? Star Trek or… whatever it's called."

"Nah," Lee answered. "I didn't think I'd get the details right and then it would bug me. I just wanted a spaceship, so… a random generic spaceship," he shrugged and then clapped his hands together excitedly. "Let's go find the engines!"

Harry hesitated but… well there was still time until the session and it couldn't hurt exactly, could it? They'd muck about a bit and then come out and then he'd make the usual training room, plus the dummies for target practice. It wasn't as if having a bit of fun could hurt them anyway – Merlin knew Harry could've used a bit of carefree fun.

"Lead the way," he said and with the still somewhat confused Fred and George tagging along, then went about trying to find the ship's engines.

The ship was dark throughout – except for the faintly lit up ancient runes that ran along the walls. Harry eyed them with some amusement as they walked around, trying to find wherever the engine might be. Ancient magical runes on a supposed spaceship. Poor Room of Requirement, trying to make a _scifi_ thing with magical means. Ancient runes aside, though, it had done pretty good job.

The ship was huge – the biggest thing they'd ever managed to make the Room turn into, easily. It had several corridors and a lot of rooms, some of them empty, most of them full of strange tables with weird symbols and stones on them. There weren't windows in every room, but those rooms that had windows, the view was always spectacular – with the sharpest, brightest stars Harry had ever seen. Even in Astronomy session and whilst using a telescope he hadn't seen so many, so bright stars.

"I guess it's the whole not looking at them through an atmosphere," Lee said when he commented on it. "Pity we don't seem to be anywhere near a planet – it would've been unspeakably awesome, to see Earth from orbit."

"I guess the Room of Requirement didn't have any idea how to make that happen," Harry shrugged. "I don't know what Earth looks from orbit – do you?"

Lee shrugged.

"This is boring. Why is it so dark in here? You can't even see anything here – not that there's anything interesting to be seen anyway," Fred complained. "It's just corridors and rooms and stars. How is this in any way exciting?"

"This is _so_ exciting – shut up," Lee answered. "You uncultured, uneducated swine."

"And how," Fred answered. "But no, seriously. What's the point?"

"It's a _spaceship_ ," Lee said, with some exasperation. "That's the point. You know, you could just take off if you don't want to be here."

George sighed, clasping his hands behind his neck and peering at the ceiling. "Well we're already here – might as well see the rest. See what's so special about these enguines."

"Engines," Harry corrected him. "Why is it so dark in here, though?" he wondered, glancing at Lee. "It kind of doesn't make sense. Did you want a dark spaceship?"

"No, not really. But I guess I didn't really specify that I wanted light, either," Lee shrugged. "Stop moaning, you guys. It's not like it's a problem - we have wands after all."

"Your fakeship sucks, Lee."

"Shut up, you prick."

It took some time and wandering around until they found what was most likely the engine. Or… something like it, anyway. It was one of the biggest rooms they'd seen so far, three, four stories tall with an enormous and enormously complicated looking shaft thing running from ceiling to floor. There were cat walks leading to it, and platforms arranged around it with some of the weird pedestal tables and a few glass screens here and there.

"Looks busted," George commented.

"Hm," Lee agreed with a nod, frowning as he leaned onto a railing and peered at the bottom of the enormous room. The crystal shaft thingy was completely dark. "Busted or just turned off. Wonder if we could fix it…"

"It's not actually real, you know," Fred said.

"I swear to god, Fred, I will hex you."

"It's kind of weird that it is busted, though," Harry said. "Makes sense that the ship is dark, if this is the engine or the power… something. But why would it be busted, when this is basically just a simulation of a spaceship. What's the point in simulating a broken spaceship?"

"Testament to Lee's poor imagination skills," Fred said and then jerked back as Lee punched him on the shoulder.

"Maybe there's a limit to what the Room of Requirement can do – maybe it just can't do complicated things like whatever this is," George said, folding his arms. "So instead of trying to make it work, it made it _broken_ because that's easier?"

"Might be," Lee said. "Still, this place is so cool. I wonder if we could… I dunno. Fix it."

"It's not real," Fred said in sing-song tone.

"I don't mean it literally – I mean. Fix the simulation – or help the Room along or stuff," Lee said, peering around. "Even if it's not real it would be cool if we could… I dunno, make it work. Maybe even actually pilot it."

"Wait. Pilot it?" Fred said. "Like move it?"

"It is a _ship_ ," Lee said. "By definition they're meant to move."

"Huh. Interesting."

Harry looked around and then checked his watch. "Well, hope you don't mind it but I'm going to have to ask you to do it later. I need to start getting the room ready for the meeting. We should head back to the door."

 "Yeah, sure," Lee said with a sigh and then glanced at a nearby wall and the ancient runes on it. "Gonna have to bring a dictionary with me, next time," he muttered and with one last regretful look at the ship's strange power room, he turned around and they headed back.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry didn't really give much thought to the whole spaceship incident. With the D.A, and with Umbridge and the Ministry almost literally breathing down all their necks, there just wasn't any time – especially since it felt like Umbridge was doing everything but stalking him all across the school. He probably would've forgotten the spaceship thing entirely, if it hadn't been for the rest of the D.A.

"Is it true that the twins made a spaceship?" Dean Thomas asked him in a hushed tone at dinner one night. "With the, the… the _Room_ I mean?"

"What?" Harry asked. "Oh, well. Yeah, something like that. What about it?"

Dean's eyes all but glittered. "Wicked. Can I see it?"

"Uh… yeah, I guess? Where did you even find out about it though?"

"I heard them pestering Angelina Johnson about it. Something about ancient runes on the walls."

"What's this?" Hermione asked on the other side of the table. "Ancient runes where?"

"The twins made a spaceship with the Room!" Dean whispered to her. "And there's ancient runes on the walls, which is not really important because _spaceship_!"

"They made a what?"

"What's a spaceship?" Ron asked, blinking.

It spread like wildfire, from the Gryffindor side to the Ravenclaws to the Hufflepuffs until the entire D.A. – or at least that side of it that was familiar with muggle science fiction – wanted to see the spaceship. And since _they_ were so adamant about seeing the spaceship, everyone else wanted to see it too – see what all the fuss was about.

George, Fred and Lee weren't as excited about it – they had apparently hoped to keep the whole thing to themselves. Harry got some sharp looks from them for a while, before they decided with a fatalistic sigh that, "I guess just once can't hurt anybody. But just once!"

"If everyone wants to visit this… spaceship, though, it might mess up a whole session," Hermione pointed out – as if she too hadn't whooped a little under her breath when the twins and Lee had promised to show the rest of the D.A. around.

"I guess we can hold one session in the spaceship?" Harry mused with a shake of his head. "I was hoping to go over some non-magical combat and the spaceship is as good a place to do it as any."

So, when the next session was held, Lee – who now had the knack of bringing up the spaceship down pat – brought out the oval shaped metal door. Then he grandly showed everyone else in – with a very giddy group of half-bloods and muggleborns hurrying forward, almost stumbling over each other with their eagerness to see, and purebloods following with some confusion.

"Soo," Ron said as he looked around in the corridor that led from the Room entrance further to the ship. "It's… very nice?" he offered, glancing up at the arched ceiling that met in a point above them, with metal arches supporting it. "Very… different?"

"Oh my god it is _so_ cliché," Justin Finch-Fletchley said, all but jumping with excitement as he skipped ahead. "Hey, hey, Jordan, is there a _bridge_?"

"Oh yeah," Lee grinned. "Right this way, ladies and gentlemen."

It was obvious that Lee, Fred and George had been to the spaceship after their initial entrance – Lee now had not just a hand drawn map, but he had an actual book with pages written full of the ancient runes written on the walls. As they walked like it was some sort of weird school tour, he explained things they'd so far seen and discovered, throwing in theories about what this and that room was for.

"So far we've not found any sort of living quarters or anything, which makes me believe that we have yet to explore the entire ship – and that there might be secret passages or hidden doorways we've yet to discover," Lee said in his announcer voice, obviously delighted to play the tour guide. "But we have found several rooms we believe to be some sort of alien laboratories, which is much more interesting anyway."

"Alien laboratories?" Hermione asked with some amusement.

"Well. It's obviously not a _human_ made ship, so. Alien spaceship, with alien laboratories," Lee said, all false modesty, and somewhere in the background someone squealed quietly.

The _bridge_ of the ship was definitely very bridge like. There was no command chair, not like what little Harry had seen of scifi shows, but there was an arrangement of the pedestal tables and many screens that had a very command-station like appearance. All of them were set to face a set of windows that arched around half of the room, giving the supposed bridge easily the best view in the entire ship.

"This is so wicked," Seamus Finnegan murmured, after having been zapped by the energy window for leaning in too much.

"It's really not very realistic, though," Hermione commented. "A real spaceship would never be like this – and I am not even going to mention the gravity on a what seems to be mostly stationary spaceship."

"Yes, Hermione, don't mention it," Lee said. "It's a spaceship. Enjoy the spaceship."

"That's in _space_." Fred agreed.

"For it is a _spaceship,_ " George nodded.

They held that D.A. session on the spaceship's bridge – though Lee was adamant about them not damaging anything on the bridge. That was easily enough done, as Harry only showed his rag tag bunch of students a very mild attack charm – which splattered the victim with paint – to use on each other as they practiced dodging and parrying. Worst damage they caused in the room was some stains, which were easy enough to remove.

Usually the D.A. dispersed soon after Harry called them finished with a session – which that day took a bit longer, wizards not being that used to having to be actually physically active in a fight, getting them to think right had taken some time. This time, though, most of them were in no hurry to leave and instead pestered Lee, Fred and George to show them around on the spaceship some more. And pretty much all of them had questions.

"Isn't there any power? Have you found the power room, or equivalent?"

"Can you see any planets or moons or anything from any of the windows?"

"Do you think you could actually pilot this thing, if you got it working?"

And so on. Lee preened under the attention and while Harry shook his head at the whole thing, he and the twins led their increasingly interested followers around the ship in an extended tour.

"So. What _is_ so interesting about this place?" Ron asked, turning to Harry as the others left.

"It's a muggle thing. You should ask Hermione really – I don't really know that much about this sort of stuff myself," Harry shrugged, looking through the bridge's… front window. Wind shield? Probably not. The view outside was very nice though – the Milky Way stretched across the window, a cloudy tear of light through the star spotted field of darkness.

"Well," Ron said. "I guess it makes a bit of a change from the usual room. And it is a bloody spectacular view."

"That it is," Harry agreed.

He was and wasn't expecting it, but after the first session on the spaceship, the rest of the D.A. suggested – not very subtly – that the rest of the sessions could maybe be held there too? And not just that, but Harry was pretty sure that there was a club brewing up inside the D.A, made of half-bloods and muggleborns and interested purebloods, who in their off time snuck into the spaceship to explore and experiment. Hermione, Harry wasn't really surprised to find, was an avid member.

"It's the most fascinating thing," she told Ron and him later, while they were doing homework in the Hogwarts courtyard, enjoying what might be one of the last sunny days of fall. "Ancient runes are, of course, the primary language of written magic – spell circles and magical artificing are all done with ancient runes, of course. But their presence on the spaceship suggests and it's the written language _Hogwarts_ was built on. There must've been so much written spell work involved in the castle's creation – the castle, the wards and of course the Room of Requirement itself."

"And? So? Therefore?" Ron asked while looking at his potions essay like he was contemplating turning it into a paper plane.

"Well, the runes on the spaceship prove it! The _language_ of them, Ron! It's so different from how runes are used these days," Hermione said giddily. "Of course we've only managed to translate small portions of the ship – and most of them are generic scifi stuff, naming floors and rooms and their purposes and whatnot. But they're written in a style that's not used anymore. These are really _ancient_ ancient runes!"

"So you're translating them too, huh?" Harry asked, adding a bit of stuffing into his essay by basically repeating what he'd already written a couple paragraphs ago – just changing the wording of it. Snape was going to fail his essay anyway, so it didn't really matter what he wrote on it – he just wanted to get the appropriate inches and call himself done with it.

"It's good practice," Hermione answered with a shrug.

Soon pretty much everyone in the D.A. could open the door to the spaceship, and most everyone was spending at least some extra time there. Harry at first didn't share their enthusiasm. Not that there was anything wrong with the spaceship – it was just rather dark and cold and since he didn't know anything about ancient runes or engines or spaceships in general he didn't have much to do there. But like Ron said, the view was bloody spectacular and he wasn't immune to it.

Neither was anyone else, really.

"Evening, Luna," Harry said as he entered the bridge, not in the least surprised to see the Ravenclaw sitting there, cross legged in front of the windows. "How goes it?"

"There's a shooting star," she said happily as he joined her. "It has a long tail. See?"

Someone had taken a bunch of seat pillows from somewhere – probably the Room of Hidden Things – and spread them all across the front of the bridge's window. Harry took one of them and set it beside her before sitting down. "Yeah," he said as he saw the shooting star. "Very pretty."

"It's not actually a shooting star, though. Not like we could see at Hogwarts," Luna said serenely. "Those hit earth and are destroyed in the atmosphere, usually. This one's never going to get anywhere near Earth."

"Huh," Harry answered. "So, it's a comet? Looks like one, with that tail and all."

"Hmm," Luna nodded and for a long while they just sat there, watching how the comet cut through the field of stars. "Did you ever wonder why they teach astronomy here?" she asked suddenly.

"I uh… not really?" Harry answered. "I thought it was a prerequisite for Alchemy or something."

"Maybe. But they start teaching us astronomy in the first year," she added. "Eleven year old kids, awake in the middle of the night to watch the stars. It's a bit much just as a perquisite for an elective course, don't you think? I think I could navigate by the stars, now. Could you?"

Harry considered it. Astronomy wasn't his favourite class, but it was by no means his least favourite either. It fell somewhere after Transfiguration and before Charms. He'd always been semi decent at it – if he couldn't always recognise a star by the looks of it, he could always name star patterns and constellations. "Yeah, I think I could," he said thoughtfully.

"Astronomy doesn't have that much of an impact on wizards," Luna said thoughtfully. "Astrology does, but it's taught as part of Divination. Astronomy is just stars and celestial objects and stellar mechanics. And despite the fact that there aren't really… any occupations in the wizarding world that use it, it's taught the full seven years. As a required course."

She turned to look at him, smiling. "Isn't that interesting?"

"You know, it actually is," Harry agreed thoughtfully.

She nodded, satisfied and turned back to the stars. Then, after a moment, she added. "It's that way in every magical school, you know," she said. "Every one of them starts out with Astronomy in the first year."

"Huh," Harry answered and they sat there peacefully for a long while, watching the Milky Way and the comet cutting a thin line across it. "You know what we should do?" he then asked. "We should bring telescopes here."

"Stellar idea," Luna agreed.

They weren't the only ones who had been thinking about stars and astronomy – Cho Chang and Marietta Edcombe had both been considering it too. A couple D.A. sessions later – which were held now in one of the larger store rooms because no one wanted to risk damage to the bridge – they brought out star charts and calculations for the rest to examine.

"And we're pretty much sure we're here," Cho announced finally with triumph, pointing out a point on the map. "Or the spaceship is anyway."

"The asteroid belt?" Lee asked. "Makes sense, since there's an asteroid nearby."

"How did you figure this out?" George asked.

"Calculating the distance of the sun, and by your usual navigation methods. Plus we finally figured which dot out there," Marietta motioned at a nearby window, "is probably Earth, and that gave us a pretty accurate distance."

"Shouldn't there be a lot more asteroids around here, if this _is_ the asteroid belt?" Dennis Creevey piped up.

"Actually, no," Hermione shook her head. "The asteroid belt pretty sparse, nothing like what they make it look like on the telly. The average distance between objects is around twenty four times the circumference of the Earth. It's a surprise we can see one asteroid from here, really."

"Well, aside from the fact the whole place isn't even real, yeah," Fred mused, considering the navigational charts Cho and Marietta had made.

"Still, pretty cool that we have an actual _location_ here," Lee grinned.

"How are we coming along trying to fix the ship?" someone asked. "Do we know what's wrong with it? It would be so cool if we could fly around, I mean. The asteroid belt! Aren't there like dwarf planets here?"

"Well, just the one. Ceres is the only one big enough, the rest are minor planets and big asteroids," Hermione said.

"Still, it would be so cool."

"We haven't figured out the power situation yet. Best we can tell is that the place is either out of power or broken or just… turned off, and we haven't figured out how to turn it on yet," Lee said thoughtfully.

"And then there's the whole thing about it being make believe created by the Room of Requirement and it probably never had power in the first place," Fred added, and was promptly booed by pretty much everyone.

"Well, if since it is a magical construct," George said thoughtfully, ignoring how someone belted his twin brother on the head with a quill case. "Maybe we can use magic to power it, somehow?"

"That probably will be the only way," Lee agreed.

Harry shook his head at all of them and stood up. The whole spaceship situation was a bit beside the point, but… he couldn't exactly deny he was curious too. "It's getting late," he said. "If we stick around any longer, we won't get back to our common rooms before curfew. So how about we call it quits for tonight?"

There were some groans and moans – someone actually asked, "Do we have to, Professor," which made lot of people snicker.

Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm the only teacher in the history of Hogwarts who has to kick his students out, I swear," he muttered. "Keep it up and I'll give you all homework."

That made everyone pause and look at him almost expectantly. A couple of them even took out quills and note books.

"Er," he said. "Well, okay then. Ten inches on magical fuels, power systems or engines, if you know anything about them – if not, then any general theories about how to power the ship."

"Just ten inches?" Hermione asked in dismay. "I have _so many_ theories!"

Harry gave her a flat look. "Of course you do. You can think of it as a personal challenge, how much information you can compress into that amount of space. And I swear to Merlin, if I have to read more than that from you, I will take every extra inch and burn it right in front of you. And I will enjoy it greatly."

As the D.A. laughed and began to disperse, Harry shook his head and wondered how this had become his life – and how on earth the D.A. had turned into a spaceship club.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry didn't think they would actually write the essays – but they did. Each and every member of the D.A. took time from their actual school work and O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. studies to actually write him an essay concerning some aspect of the spaceship's power system, flight system or whatever they thought they could contribute to the matter.

Cho Chang wrote about Floo powder and its history – it was originally an Alchemical fuel used in transmutations, and might still be used that way. Luna wrote about the explosive power of some creature called a Triple Sided Bwuedged which probably didn't even exist. Fred and George wrote a twin essay about this powder they'd invented which they intended to use in creation of fireworks. Hermione wrote a very tightly packed essay of theories about worm holes and faster-than-light travel and how to translate them into magic. Lee wrote about theories of warp drives and warp travel – apparently it wasn't complete scifi nonsense and there was actually a very recent theory about it by some muggle that suggested that it might actually be feasible, something about field equations and general relativity.

"Professor," Harry said to McGonagall in passing after the younger members of the D.A. basically hunted him down to hand in their assignments. "I finally understand you and you have all my sympathies and respect."

"Pardon me, Potter?" she asked.

Harry couldn't deny that it wasn interesting – he might've given the matter of powering the spaceship some thought himself. Just, not _this_ much thought. Plus, a lot of the essays – like Lee's monster essay which somehow managed to condense a chunk of general relativity into it and Hermione's digest of worm holes and port keys and whatnot – went completely over his head. He was obviously not anywhere near smart enough to actually be assigning tasks like this to his students.

"So," he said to Hermione at dinner, after reading all twenty eight essays. "Explain general relativity to me in twenty words or less."

"Er," she answered, looking wide eyed. "Um… Well, it's Einstein's theory of the universe and gravity – it's about space being curved."

Harry gave her a look. "Helpful. Thank you."

She laughed and then glanced around before reaching out and yanking the table cloth from under the bowl of roasted potatoes. "Hold this," she said, and with Harry holding the table cloth she dropped an empty glass on it – then proceeded to explain the theory of space time as fabric that massive objects – or all objects really – apparently could affect.

It drew the eyes most of the people at the table, and considering that they were mostly surrounded by D.A. members, the interest was pointed. While Harry tried to wrap his head around the idea of the solar system sitting on some sort of celestial fabric, with sun causing a dip in the middle, more and more D.A. members trickled near to listen to Hermione's explanation – and then Hermione's and Lee's discussion concerning it, since apparently they were the only two people in the D.A. who understood the concept.

"And the idea of warp drive?" Harry asked, glancing at Lee.

"Well, it's like this," Lee said and took the glass off the table cloth, setting a plum on it instead. "This is a ship. And this is how a warp core works. It sort of pinches the space in front of it, like this," he poked down on the fabric next the plum, making a dip in the table cloth. "And in the meantime it swells the space behind it, sort of like this," he added, and then from underneath the fabric on the other side of the plum he poked a finger up. Then he moved the downward pointing finger and the up wards pointing finger in unison. The plum fell into the dip of the first finger and then moved with them. "And that is, sort of, warp drive in a nut shell. It would negate the limitations of time dilation and such, and allow faster than light travel. Theoretically anyway."

"Huh," Harry answered, looking at the fabric and the plum. "And you do this… how?"

"Nobody knows," Lee said solemnly. "Well, there are theories and calculations, but no one knows how to actually make it happen except that it would take a stupidly huge amount of power."

Harry nodded slowly and titled his head. "I don't think this will help us fix the ship, though," he said then, arching his eyebrows. "And I don't think we need to move faster than the speed of light. Not right now anyway."

"Ah, heh. I guess I got sidetracked a bit," Lee said sheepishly.

"What is this then, children?" a sickly sweet voice asked somewhere behind Harry and he just barely managed to keep him from cringing as Umbridge leaned in.

"It's a muggle theory of how the universe works," Harry answered through a forced smile and gritted teeth. "Called general relativity. Perhaps you've heard about it."

"Oh," she said, giving the table cloth a weird twisted mixture of an indulgent smile and a dismissive sneer. "Muggles know nothing about the universe, Mr. Potter and you should do better not to entertain their foolish notions. Two points from Gryffindor for inappropriate use of school property. Put the table cloth where it belongs and concentrate on your dinner, now."

Harry hesitated and then put the table cloth down again while Lee snatched the plum from it and took a bite. They waited in tense, uncomfortable silence until Umbridge walked away and then shared dark looks.

"Ugh," Ginny finally said.

"Hear, hear," Fred agreed.

Hermione was looking thoughtfully after the professor, though. "That's interesting," she said and smiled. "She doesn't seem to care for muggle concepts. That could be useful."

"Like how?" Ron asked, glaring after Umbridge.

"I don't know," Hermione said. "But the thought had occurred that we could probably talk all sorts of spaceship stuff right in open here, and no one could understand a word of it."

Still, they moved their discussions to less public places – like the Room of Requirement, and the actual ship. While Harry helped those D.A. members with troubles with the actual D.A. subjects, Hermione and Lee held a grand debate over the ship's power systems, throwing theories and concepts at each other while a large number of older students watched like it was a talk show.

"You know, my mum has this spell," Seamus offered into the debate. "Pretty sure it's not strictly speaking _legal_ or anything. She uses it to charge batteries and stuff – because, you know, half-blood household, we've got lot of muggle gadgetry around."

"She… charges batteries with a spell?" Hermione asked, fascinated.

"Yeah," Seamus shrugged. "It's a sort of lightning spell I guess, because you know, electricity. Dunno if it would work with the spaceship, but it's something, I guess."

"Hey, I've got a question," Zacharias Smith said, actually holding his hand up. "Have we, I don't know… cast any diagnostic charms on the power core? It might shed some light onto what actually powers the thing. Just a thought."

That prompted a lot of spell theory and eventually actual testing. Harry was there when they started – they actually waited on him because for some reason everyone felt they needed his go ahead before they did stuff even though the spaceship was really more Lee's thing than his. Still, it wasn't until he gave his approving nod that they started to actually experiment on the pillar of crystal that they'd come to call the _power core_.

First there were diagnostic charms, and then there were tentative repair charms just in case something was broken in the power core. Then, while everyone ignored Fred's pointed throat clearing and muttering about how none of it was actually really real or anything, the attempts of recharging the core began.

"Well, the systems are powered by electricity," Lee said. "Just… a _ridiculous_ amount of electricity."

"Yeeah," Hermione said. "If I'm reading this right, it takes about as much electricity to power this ship as it takes to power… most of Earth."

"So, can't exactly power it with recharging spells, huh?"

"Yeah, I'd say no. Now the question is, what _does_ power it? What produces that much electricity?"

"Nuclear reactor, maybe?" Lee suggested.

"That's not something we can exactly duplicate, is it? I kind of doubt that's it anyway. Check this point, here. I'm getting some strange readings here – can't make heads or tails of it… might be fuel residue. What do you make of it?"

Harry listened to them for a while and then, as they delved deeper and deeper into residual energy readings, he quietly slipped away from the power room. It seemed like they had the whole thing in hand, and it went way over his head anyway.

"You know, I think those two forget the key point of this whole thing," Fred commented. "Mainly the fact that it's not real."

Harry hummed, glancing around. "Seems pretty real to me," he said. "Besides it's not hurting anybody and anything that distracts Hermione from stressing over O.W.L.s is a good thing in my books."

"That's a very good point," Fred agreed.

"What would happen if we _did_ manage to power the spaceship, though?" George asked. "Just. What then?"

"Then we'd… do stuff, I guess," Harry shrugged. "Figure out how to pilot it, maybe. Check out that asteroid we're orbiting maybe."

"Hmm," Fred hummed, folding his arms. "And _then_ what?"

Harry shrugged. "I've got no idea. Check it out I guess. I wonder if anyone has found any spacesuits around here – have you?"

They gave him a strange look. "What's a _spacesuit_?"

While the twins ran off with the concept of spacesuits and completely separating a person from their surrounding environment – muttering something about the black lake and checking out the mermaids – Harry checked in with other groups of people that had by now scattered around the spaceship, pursuing whatever interested them.

Angelina Johnson, Anthony Goldstein, Zacharias Smith, Padma Patil and Terry Boot had tackled the ancient runes all around the ship and were going around translating them – they'd taken to pinning bits of parchment here and there, where ever they'd translated something before moving on. Most of their translations were basic scifi ship directions – room so and so on level so and so, things like that. But then there were a few rooms where the walls were full of text, and then there were the pedestal tables.

The tables, everyone figured out, were probably control consoles – though no one had much idea how to work them. They had a grid patterns on them, with scattered runes here and there marking this or that position on the grid. And, judging by the rounded triangular stones all of the pedestal tables had on them, stuck to the tables by magnets or something, the way you interacted with the tables was by moving the stones around.

"I'm pretty sure that these are some sort of environmental controls," Terry Boot said, explaining one table to Harry. "Life support and things like that. It's more specialised than a lot of the other tables – these here probably indicate indoor temperatures and this part, probably, has to do with element levels in the atmosphere. Or maybe atmospheric pressure."

"Okay," Harry said obligingly, eying the grid table. "Out of curiosity, have you figured out if the ship has any general purpose?"

"Er, what?" Angelina asked.

Harry shrugged. "Is it a ship for the sake of being a ship or does it have an actual mission or something? Exploration or something."

The translation team exchanged looks. "Well, not really," Anthony said, folding his arms and looking thoughtful. "Everything here sort of relates to function or purpose. This part goes here, this is for this purpose, that sort of thing."

"But there are a lot of laboratories around, we know that much," Padma said. "Or at least we think they're laboratories – the runes sort of indicate the study of elements and geology and things like that. So it might be an exploration ship?"

"Maybe the aliens were conquerors looking for a planet to take over and terraform to their needs," Zacharias suggested. "And they were aiming for Earth."

"That's a cheerful thought," Harry snorted. "Well, let me know if you figure anything new out."

"Will do," Angelina said.

"And let me know if you find out if the ship has a name, okay?"

There were a lot of people from the D.A. who had less to contribute than he did, though. A lot of their members were just loitering around, or enjoying the view – there was a row of telescopes on the bridge now, acquired from who knew were. They were in frequent use, as was the bridge in general. With the Milky Way just outside the window, a lot of people preferred it to other rooms on the ship, so it had turned into a sort of general lounge area where a lot of them did their homework.

"So, I've been talking it over with Fred and George, who talk about nothing else with Lee," Ginny said, while Harry joined them in order to finish his divination essay in a good company. "Lee thinks this spaceship could travel from star to star."

"That's the general idea behind scifi spaceships," Harry agreed.

"If we got it working, do you think we could do it too?"

Harry considered it and shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. We'll see once they get the power online. I don't think we should aim that high just yet, though," he added. "For one we have no idea if we can even pilot the ship. If they get the power working, we should try and figure out the ship's systems first and then, if we _can_ pilot it, we should test it around the asteroid belt first."

She nodded, as did the others around them, Lavender leaning back thoughtfully and just gazing out into the space outside the energy window. "Harry?" she then said. "This isn't just a room in the Room of Requirement, is it?" she asked. "I mean… it isn't, is it? This is _nothing_ like the rest of Hogwarts, and nothing like any other room we've gotten the Room of Requirement to turn into. And this is definitely not even a room, it's a whole complex system of rooms and halls and corridors!"

"I think it's bigger than the rest of Hogwarts," Parvati agreed. "Haven't we counted something like eighty rooms and at least twenty corridors by now?"

Harry smiled and shrugged.

What Hermione and Lee did with the power core, none of them could _quite_ figure out. It had something to do with expansion and duplication charms and stretching out the fuel residue they'd found into a large enough sum for the power core to register it as a legitimate power source, or something like that. However they did it aside, a couple D.A. sessions later the ship came alive with a hum and flicker of the lights, and every room, corridor and hall was suddenly lit up.

And every pedestal console lit as they were powered up and brought online.

"Well," Harry said as the D.A. gathered in the bridge, Lee and Hermione and all the rest all but vibrating with their eagerness to get at all the consoles and whatever they could do with them. "So, now we have power. Has anyone tried out the consoles yet?"

Hermione's and Lee's hands shot up. "Just a bit in the power room – we wanted to see if we could figure out how much power we had," Lee said.

"Which isn't much, actually," Hermione said. "Something like zero point two percent of full capacity – that's as far as we could extend the residue without ruining its stability."

"What's zero point two percent good for?" Zacharias asked.

"Not much, but we have a semi functional ship now," Hermione shrugged. "If nothing else, the consoles work now, so we can access the ship's systems."

"Can we move?" Ginny asked.

"Probably not – at least, not very far. We'd need to find the thrusters controls and whatnot, and see how the ship actually moves around in the first place – and how much power those functions use."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. "Alright. Since we don't know how much power we have, let's try to spare it. First we need to figure out power controls and figure out how to limit the power we're using. Lee, Hermione, you can do that, I suppose?"

"Aye, aye, captain," Lee said, saluting sloppily.

"Angelina?" Harry turned to his fellow Quidditch player. "You and your team tackle the ship's database – if there is any. Try and figure out the ship's purpose and key functions, what it can do and what it's for."

"Alright," she said, folding her arms. "It might take some time but we'll see what we can do."

"Cho, you and your team try and figure out the piloting system, if there is any. Since you have the navigation down, you're our best bet concerning how this thing operates, when it comes to moving it."

"Uh. Okay. We'll try," Cho said awkwardly. "I can't promise we'll succeed, though."

"Good enough for me. Work with Angelina's team. The rest of you, please… don't touch anything," Harry said. "At least not until we figure out which button is the self-destruct. Let's not blow ourselves up, okay?"

They dispersed, everyone heading their own way, all of them giddy to explore the ship now that it was lit up. The whole place looked different, after all, and a lot of the details they'd missed before were obvious now. Harry was definitely looking forward to making a bit of time for investigation around the ship, see if he could find anything new.

"Well, look at you," Ron snorted at him. "Captain Harry Potter, of… uh. Do we have a name for the ship yet?"

"Not yet," Harry said. "I suppose the ship already has a name, we just haven't been able to figure it out yet."

"You know, during the sailing ship era, during wars nations usually renamed captured ships," Hermione said, walking over to them. "I don't see why we couldn't name the ship ourselves."

"Well, it's not like there's anyone to object," Ron said and looked at Harry. "Well? What are we going to call it, captain?"


	4. Chapter 4

Harry stood on the bridge of the newly renamed D.S.S. Requirement while Cho and Marietta worked on the controls, Angelina and her team backing them with quick fire translations. Since they'd managed to bring the ship's power back online, there'd been a mad scramble to understand all the systems they now had access to. While the first priority had been the database and figuring out the ship's purpose, the one everyone had waited for the most was being tested now.

"Alright," Cho said, a hand resting on the smooth white control rock that rested on the control grid in front of her. She looked up and at the screen. "If we all die, then I'd like to take this moment to say that it's been a pleasure serving with you, gentlemen."

There was a round of nervous, giddy laughter. Cho took a deep breath and glanced at Harry.

"Go on," Harry said, nodding.

"Aye, aye," she answered, and pushed the rock smoothly forward on the grid. "Inserting coordinates… now."

One of the first things they'd figured out about the D.S.S. Requirement was that it didn't have actual flight controls – you couldn't really _drive_ it, or even pilot it manually. Every movement had to be programmed into the flight computer instead – or at least that was what they were calling it. Everything from intergalactic leaps to the tiniest nudges of a couple of miles had to be plotted out. It was both a trickier and easier way of manoeuvring in space than any of them had expected. Trickier because to do _anything_ they needed to have the exact galactic coordinates of both the starting point and the destination. And easier because all you had to do was to punch in those numbers and then the ship did the rest.

Cho and Marietta and their team had worked on figuring out the coordinate system for the better part of a week, digging through the database until they got access to the map information. Thankfully the ship had most of the galaxy pretty much mapped out, including the solar system and that included the coordinates. Problem was, of course, that it was all in ancient runes, so everything had to be translated before anything could be used safely. And even after that there was no way to know that they were doing the right thing.

But they'd done as much as they could, all that was left was to test it. Cho gave the flight computer the two coordinates – their current location and their destination. Then they all waited, holding their breaths and staring out the front windows to see if anything changed.

It happened so smoothly that it was somewhat unnerving. There was no jerk or sensation of movement – the ship felt perfectly stationary under all their feet. But the view outside the window changed, whirling fast and smooth to the side until the asteroid that usually hung _below_ them was lifted up into their view. Then it got _rapidly_ bigger, zooming from a distant shape to block out the majority of the view in front of them.

"Merlin's _balls_ , man," someone muttered with surprise as they stopped moving as quickly as they had started – nose to nose with the asteroid that they had previously only distantly seen. A couple of the D.A. members actually stumbled back in shock. It was dark, pockmarked with a couple of craters and impact scars, and so immensely big that it was pretty intimidating.

"Alright," Harry said, stepping closer to the window even as everyone else backed away with surprise. "Zacharias?" he said.

"Right, right," the Hufflepuff answered and turned his attention to the control pedestal in front of him. He moved a couple of the control stones on the grid, and eyed the glass screen in front of the pedestal. "Hmmm I don't think we're getting anything new," he said. "It's a carbonaceous asteroid, mostly. Some silicates, bit of clay minerals, some magnetite… a lot of water ice."

"Hmm," Harry answered, folding his arms and eyeing the asteroid. "Well. Now we know we can move the ship. Cho, can you move us back a bit, though? Being this close to an asteroid that's spinning on such a weird axis is making me a bit nervous."

"I can try?" Cho said. "Now that I know how it works it shouldn't be so hard…"

Harry took a smooth white stone from his pocket, turning it in his hands before tapping it gently. "Hermione, Lee?" he asked, feeling a bit silly directing his words at a rock.

"I guess it worked?" Hermione's voice answered, crystal clear, from the rock.

"Yeah. How does the power look?"

"Pretty good, actually. We didn't use that much power. If the power usage is constant, we could go around the solar system a couple of times before running out," she answered.

"How does the asteroid look?" Lee's voice asked.

"Kind of terrifying. We're going to back away a bit – we got a bit too close for comfort," Harry answered.

A moment later, Cho put in the new coordinates, and obligingly the ship backed away as smoothly as it had moved forward – the asteroid shrinking into a much manageable size in the window. It made everyone on the bridge release the breaths they'd been holding and relax a bit – a couple of them even laughed in relief.

"So, we can move," Harry said, arching his eyebrows.

"We can move," Cho answered with a grin, and the ship's bridge exploded into cheers.

Next they just had to figure out what to _do_ with their new found ability to traverse the solar system. Though they had a bit of power, bit didn't count for much when it had to do with space travel – and once they ran out again, the ship would once more go dark and unresponsive. And, having gotten used to the lights, none of them wanted it to happen.

"If you ask me, I think the ship was originally headed for the asteroid to refuel," Lee said, in their next D.A. meeting, after Harry had finished that day's lessons and they had moved onto much more interesting spaceship matters. "It's the only explanation – I mean, the ship was really close to an asteroid. Like, really close. Too close for it to be anything but intentional."

"But there's no fuel on that asteroid, is there?" Colin Creevey asked. "It's just carbon and rock and ice, isn't it?"

"Precisely. Ice," Lee said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Colin. "Ice. _Water_. We can't make heads or tails of the actual fuel the ship uses, but we know it can probably take other forms too – with some adjustments and a bit of tinkering. Split water up and you have in your hands oxygen and hydrogen. Both of which can be used to make rocket fuel. It's seriously energy inefficient when compared to what this ship usually uses, but… it's better than nothing."

"So the ship was heading for the asteroid to refuel but ran out of power before it could make it?" Harry asked.

"The last of its power was probably used to decelerate," Hermione nodded.

"So why didn't they refuel?" Fred asked. "Aside from the fact that they didn't actually exist and this is just make believe. They got this close – why didn't they refuel?"

"At a guess… they couldn't," Hermione said, shrugging. "We have no idea how they would've mined the asteroid. Chances are they didn't have power for it. Or maybe something else stopped them, or maybe they were evacuated or maybe they all just died."

"If they all died, where are the remains? I haven't seen any alien skeletons, have you?"

"The ship's cleaning system. It demolecularizes all materials considered waste – that's why there isn't any dust here," Angelina answered. Everyone turned to stare at her in shock. "What?" she said. "I've been trying to figure the ship's systems and purpose out. The sterilisation sweeps came up during my research."

"It… demolecularizes things?" Hermione asked. "Why hasn't it demolecularized our things? Like, say, the pillows here?"

Angelina shrugged. "It can detect and designate things as _things in use_ or something like that. Also it's calibrated to things the size of dust particles."

"But you said it would take care of bodies?"

"Well… yeah, in time, as they rotted and broke apart," she shrugged fatalistically.

There were a couple shudders around the group. Lee, however had a thoughtful look about his face.

"If this ship as the power to demolecularize things… maybe it can…" he murmured and then grabbed Hermione by the shoulder. "Hermione," he said urgently, shaking her. "Hermione. Demolecularization. Maybe also remolecularization. _Replicator technology_ , _Hermione_!"

"Oh my, I'm going to _swoon_ ," she breathed and the two of them pretty much flew off to check out whatever epiphany Lee had had.

"Er," Harry said and pointed after them. "Can anybody translate that for me?"

"It's tech they have in Star Trek," Colin said. "They can make things sort of out of nothing. They make food and stuff with it."

"If they have the base components," Dennis agreed with a nod, his eyes shining. "Do we have _replicators_?"

Harry considered it for a moment. "Right," he said and shook his head "Well, while our engineering heads are doing whatever they're doing… What else have we figured out about our ship so far?"

It was getting harder and harder to go back to Hogwarts after spending some time in the spaceship. Hogwarts was simply getting worse with each day – Umbridge and the Ministry's involvement was getting worse. Meanwhile the D.S.S. Requirement proved to be bigger and handier than they had suspected. The atmosphere between the closed up, guarded Hogwarts and the open and free D.S.S. Requirement was just… so very different. It was just so much easier to breathe on the ship.

"Not that I don't love magic – I do," Harry sighed to Luna as they peered at the Milky Way – now visible from one of the laboratories – through telescopes. "I just don't love Hogwarts as it is now."

"I hear you," she said softly.

Most of them seemed to feel the same. Still, they went back to Hogwarts, for classes, food, extracurricular activities and for sleep, slipping into the ship as quick as they could whenever they had free time. The busy usage of the Room of Requirement door made Harry decide on additional security measures, and those among them who knew ancient runes and written spell work were put to work, creating a sort of _notice me not_ screen around the entire hall just outside the door. He, Lee and Hermione tested the security of the door as well until they figured that with some specific commands they could hide the door from specific people – all the while revealing it to specific people. Using it, they could make the door non-existed to everyone, except D.A. members.

"Still, we're spending too much time around here," Harry mused to Ron one time, while watching Hermione and Lee fiddle around with one of the stranger tables around the ship – it wasn't a control console, as far as they could tell. It was circular and something extended from the ceiling towards it, a sort of bulky light. "It's starting to show and people are noticing it."

"Yeah, but what can we do about it?" Ron asked and shrugged. "It's nicer here than in the school."

Harry hummed. "I'm just worried what will happen if Umbridge figures out the Room's location. She might not be able to get in, but she can wall up the corridor."

"Ha!" Hermione said in triumph, calling for their attention. She and Lee did something, and the lights upon the strange table lit up – and a moment later, with a flash of light, something appeared. Another control – or maybe a communication – rock.

"Did we just figure something out?" Harry asked as Lee held the rock up in victory like it was a cup made of gold.

"Indeed we did, sir!" Hermione said and motioned at the rock. "We have created… a thing!"

"Created," Harry said.

"Mm-hmm," Lee said, handing the rock over and motioning at the weird circular table. "Let us introduce you to D.S.S. Requirement's very own replicator console!"

"Right. Translation?" Harry asked, turning to Hermione.

"It's basically mechanical conjuration. Or more like transfiguration – so long as you have the base materials, we can make _anything_ ," Hermione said, patting the table fondly. "This isn't actually the replicator itself – you can replicate anything to any location on the ship, because the demolecularization and remolecularization arrays are ship-wide. But here you can scan objects and manipulate their make up as you choose."

"Okay," Harry said slowly. "Soo… we can make things. That's… good?"

"That's _excellent_ , Harry. It's _brilliant,_ " Hermione assured him and then dashed over to pick up her book bag. She picked a book at random and then dashed back to the pedestal, setting it down. Bit of fiddling with a console later, there was a flash of white light – and suddenly two identical books were sitting on the pedestal.

"I think that's called forgery," Harry said, arching his eyebrows as he opened both books, finding them exactly alike right down to the notes Hermione had written on the margins.

"Well… yes," Hermione shrugged. "But imagine the things we can do! So long as we get the materials we can do _anything_. And this ship, I'm pretty sure it can pick up things from _outside_. Maybe as far away as from ten thousand miles away!"

Harry nodded slowly. "Okay," he said, not quite getting it yet.

Hermione took him by the shoulders and _shook_ him. "Harry, we can mine the asteroid, we can turn it into fuel – we can turn it into anything we want! We could even, bit by bit, replicate the entire ship if we wanted to!"

Now Harry got it. "Oh. Alright then," he said and tentatively patted her head. "Good work. Very impressive."

She preened and Lee made a face. "What, I don't get a pat on the head?"

"Good boy, very good work," Harry said obligingly and patted his dreadlocks as well, snorting with amusement as Lee too preened proudly. "Well. I guess this calls for a meeting."

They had a meeting and the meeting was divided into a couple of distinct groups. There were firstly those who thought that they should, first and foremost, do everything they could to ensure that the ship would stay powered up. It was pretty much unanimous decision that the first mining efforts and matter conjurations would be concentrated onto making fuel for the ship. Which would also involve making a _generator_ , it turned out, because the ship didn't as of yet have any way to transform rocket fuel which it could easily make into electricity. But that, Hermione assured them, would be easy as flight.

"The patterns are already there, and we pretty much have all the materials. All we have to do is press a button and we have our generator," she shrugged.

After that, though, after they could be sure of their fuel reserves, the group was divided on what they wanted. Everyone agreed that replicating the ship itself would be somewhat silly – the ship was easily as big if not bigger than Hogwarts, replicating it would take too long. However… there were a lot of them who'd been extremely disappointed by the lack of small fighters on board. There were no shuttles, no X-fighters, nothing. D.S.S. Requirement was basically the size of all mother ships of all scifi shows and movies – but it had no children.

"I don't suppose we _can_ make those?" Harry asked dubiously.

"Well, I wouldn't say we _can't_ ," Hermione said slowly. "We probably can. Making them actually work and function, on other hand, that's a bit harder. I don't think the people who made this ship had any use for small fighter type ships. We'll have to look into it."

"Question!" Ron said, his hand shooting up. "Yeah, I heard there are lot of metal rich asteroids in the asteroid belts. And not just cheap metals either. I heard you could find gold around here pretty easily. Can we mine that and conjure it into gold bars or something?"

"Er," Harry answered and then glanced at Hermione and Lee and then everyone else. Every eye was on him, all of them wide with excitement. "Well, I guess we can?" he said and folded his arms. "I suppose this gold would be for personal use?"

"We could divide it up?" Ron asked hopefully.

"You know, with the replicators or conjurators or whatever we're calling them – I'm not sure we need cash," Harry said and glanced at Hermione. "We can get pretty much get all sorts of materials from the belt, can't we?"

"Pretty much," she agreed.

"And we can make _anything_ we want to," Harry added. "Considering that we can _make_ everything… what would you need money for?"

"Well, we do need at least one of everything we want to make," Hermione said slowly. "We need to pattern the things we want to duplicate – if we wanted to duplicate a quill, we'd need an actual physical quill to pattern first."

"Yeah, that," Ron said quickly. "We could use gold to buy stuff to pattern. Also maybe a bit to send home?"

"If you started suddenly sending huge chunks of gold home, I think the Ministry and Gringotts would have some issues about it," Harry said somewhat dryly. "Besides, the mail in Hogwarts is monitored currently – Umbridge goes over every bit she thinks is interesting."

There were a lot of moans and pouts and Harry sighed. "Let's first concentrate on fuel, alright? We'll see about some other things afterwards. As it is now, the only way to get anything in or out of Hogwarts safely is to actually physically carry it with you. If you want to take something made on the ship out of the school, Christmas holidays is the time to do it. I'm sure you can all wait until then."

There were some mumbles of agreement and Harry nodded with satisfaction. "For now, let's make a list of things we might want to make, things we might need," he said and glanced at Hermione and Lee. "You work on the fuel situation. How much power does the conjurator use anyway?"

"A _lot_ ," Hermione admitted. "But if we can figure the fuel situation out, it shouldn't be a problem. There's plenty of ice and if nothing else, we can jump over to Jupiter and mine Helium-3."

"Which is?" Harry said.

"It's a non-radioactive isotope, good for nuclear fusion. It's probably the best choice for powering the ship in the long run," Hermione admitted. "We still can't make heads or tails of the ship's actual preferred fuel – as far as we can tell, it's an element that humans haven't even discovered yet. As it is, I doubt we can find any of it in our solar system."

"If we want to make actual ships, powering them with helium-3 is probably the best choice," Lee added. "But that's assuming we can make any ships at all."

"Well… let's do what we can do the easiest for now," Harry said. "Let's worry about more powerful fuels later. So, Hermione and Lee, you do what you need to do to get us a bit of a power surplus. Rest of you, ten inches on what you want made with the conjurators and why."

"Aye, aye, captain!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooo space....


	5. Chapter 5

 Harry eyed the pile of Fire Bolt's for a long, silent moment while all the people in the conjurator room squirmed nervously, Ron and the twins squirming harder than everyone else combined. There were at least a dozen brooms there – made, apparently, as exact carbon copies of his own Fire Bolt.

"Okay," he said and pushed his glasses higher up on his nose, still looking at the _pile_ of state of the art racing brooms lying on the floor in front of him. "Okay. What did we learn here?"

Hermione's hand shot up. "Duplicating magical objects doesn't duplicate the charms on them."

"Ah," Harry said, nodding. "So what we have here is… a dozen or so inert broom copies," he said and held out his hand over the pile. "Up," he commanded, and only one of the brooms – his own, original one – jumped up to his hand. He glanced it over and then rested it against his shoulder. "You know, if this was a muggle sailing ship from the eighteen hundreds, I'd be justified in _flogging_ you all."

"Ehehe – sorry?" Ron said. "You can't really blame us, though, can you?"

"If you would've _asked_ I would've happily lent the broom for your use," Harry said flatly. "But you didn't. How did you even get it up here?"

"We, uh… used your Invisibility Cloak?" Fred said, wincing.

Harry smiled. "My Invisibility Cloak. I see."

Ron – holding the Cloak as far away from himself as he could, as if expecting it to blow up at any moment – handed it back to him. Harry accepted it with a wider smile and a nod. "Thank you. How generous of you. Returning my own stolen property to me. Very nice of you."

"Guys," George stage whispered to everyone else. "I think he wants to flog us."

"Retreat," someone whispered back and people started shuffling towards the exit. "Retreat, retreat."

"Stay," Harry commanded – and everyone froze. He shook his head and turned to Hermione and Lee. "Why didn't the conjurator duplicate the charms? It can make active command stones, can't it?"

"At a guess, it just can't do magic," Hermione shrugged. "The command stones are basically machines, with their own power sources. Spells are different – they're energy without power sources or circuitry or anything like that. Also," she nodded to the pile of inert brooms. "The conjurator didn't get the exact materials right – we don't have the stuff needed, so it's basically… fake wood. So even if it could do spells, it still probably wouldn't work right because the material wouldn't be right."

"Hmm. And if we gave it wood to work with?" Harry asked.

"Well… maybe. But it still can't do spells," Lee answered, as people exchanged looks and started to tentatively relax.

"Okay. We can teach it object patterns. Why not spell patterns?" Harry asked.

"Because… magic?" Lee asked, confused.

"No, I see where you're getting," Hermione said. "It's not as easy as that – spells are organic, magic is organic. We don't just use it, we produce it. A machine, even one as advanced as the conjurator, can't do that. But…" she made a thoughtful hum. "There is a chance we can do a convincing technological knock off."

"As in?"

"Well… we tell the machine what we want, and let it churn up its own tech version of it," Hermione said thoughtfully. "The computers here are ridiculously good – and ridiculously smart. If we tell one to come up with a design for a flying broom, I think it could probably do it. It would just be tech and circuitry and most likely metal, and not much like the brooms we know and use."

"Hm," Harry answered. "Couldn't hurt to try, I guess."

"So we… can make brooms?" Ron asked hopefully.

"And you're not mad at us?" Fred asked.

"Oh, I'm pleasantly ticked off," Harry said smiling. "You prats. I'm marking you three up for my duelling opponents. Next D.A. session. It's going to be _fun_."

"Oh, bollocks," George muttered. "Well, it's not flogging."

"Isn't it?" Fred asked in dismay. "What's the difference?"

Since their discovery, the conjurator had been in steady use. First the things they had made had been relatively simple – the D.A. now had unlimited supply of parchments, quills and potion phials and other sort of general supplies. Then they'd made some other things – some of them personal, some not. Some of the students had brought out their muggle hygiene products which couldn't be gotten at Hogsmeade, and then duplicated those. After that, a lot of the girls had duplicated _their_ hygiene products, which seemed to make a lot of them _very_ happy. There was one Quidditch fan with a poster full of signatures which he'd duplicated – and then tried to sell to people in the D.A. before they booed him down. Hermione, Harry was pretty sure, was steadily copying the entire Hogwarts Library – there were now bookshelves in one of the unused rooms on board the D.S.S. Requirement. And so forth.

They'd figured out that charmed things couldn't be duplicated perfectly – the poster copies didn't move, for example. Still, the Fire Bolt incident brought the point home, and just to nail it in further Harry had all dozen inert copies mounted on the ship walls as a reminder. Ron, Fred and George winced whenever they walked past one.

"You're not _actually_ mad at them, are you?" Hermione asked while working on a holographic display of some bit of machinery she was trying to replicate.

"Well, not as such. I probably would've tried the same thing, if I had thought of it first. It's the fact that they ransacked my trunk and stole my broom _and_ my Invisibility Cloak…" Harry shrugged. "How's it coming along?"

"Well… There are several mechanisms in the database that allow flight – I could right now make a hover pallet of sorts, which can transport up to four tons weightlessly. Making it into a broom, though…" Hermione sighed and folded her arms, frowning at the glowing patterns in front of her. "The problem is the elevation," she explained. "And propulsion. The pallets use a sort of electromagnetic cushion – they work only at a certain distance from the ground. There are propulsion mechanisms here too, but… well. Those would involve actual engines."

"Electromagnetic cushion?" Harry asked and then quickly held up his hand. "No, please, don't explain. At what distance from the ground do they work from?" he asked curiously.

Hermione considered it and then held her hand at waist level. "The general type, at least," she said. "It really depends on the generator output. The electromagnetic cushion can be made thinner, so thin it almost touches the ground."

Harry eyed her for a long moment. "That… sounds familiar," he said and frowned. "I think it was something from some movie. It was Dudley's favourite and he played it all the time. Something about… being stuck on top of water for some reason?"

Hermione blinked and then her eyes widened. " _Hoverboards_ ," she whispered almost reverently, and then began rapidly working again. Harry watched her for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders, leaving her to it.

Before their next D.A. session, there was a Hogsmeade weekend and so of course, people brought their purchases to the D.S.S. Requirement. They managed to duplicate a lot of the sweets and snacks and suddenly they had a brewery's worth of butterbeer – before Hermione and Lee put an end to it.

"No more. We're running out of the harder get to materials and it's using up power," Hermione said.

"I thought we figured out the power situation already?" Harry said.

"Well, we did. It's just that the hydrogen and oxygen fuels, they're just so much weaker than what the ship's supposed to have – they spend faster," she explained. "And the conjurator uses a lot of power. And the material cost is a bigger issue – the ship has a storage of materials just for the conjurator and we're using it up."

"So we just need to replenish," Lavender said. "Can't we do it at the asteroid? We've been mining it, or… _beaming_ it or whatever it's called, haven't we?"

"No. I mean, yes we have, but we don't get all the materials we need from the asteroid," Lee said. "Not this one anyway. We need to either move or figure out some other way to replenish materials."

"Like what, carry them inside from Hogwarts?" George asked thoughtful.

"Seems a bit of a waste, what with our ability to mine _asteroids_ ," Harry said. "I guess it's time to find another asteroid, one with better resources."

"Can we find one with gold on it?" Ron asked, and Hermione slapped him soundly on the back of the head.

"Hermione, Lee – check out what we need. Zach," Harry turned to Zacharias Smith. "Can you go over the maps, see what asteroids have what?"

"Yeah, sure," the Hufflepuff said. "It's not like it's a difficult task or anything, what with most of the map being wrong about the asteroid belt, and majority of the asteroids not having been mapped out or scanned in the first place. So you know. Piece of cake."

Harry shook his head at him. "Just do what you can."

Then they had a D.A. session, and while the rest of the group worked on their shields and diversion spells, Harry went about setting up an actual duel stage and then, once the area had been marked, he turned to Ron, Fred and George. "Let's see how good your teamwork is."

"You're going to duel all of us, all at once?" Ron asked nervously, glancing at the twins.

"Getting a bit cocky, our captain," Fred said. "I think we can take him."

"Well," George said, eying Harry uneasily. "Maybe."

Harry grinned at them and took out his wand. "Get on the stage," he said.

It was great deal of fun. In the course of running the D.A. Harry hadn't just had to teach other people – he'd first had to teach a bunch of spells to _himself_ so that he could teach the others. Plus, trying to make sure that all his so called students would be well prepared for every eventuality, he had had to think both as a defender and an attacker. More as an attacker, honestly, because trying to figure out a way to go around defences was the best way to figure out how to improve them.

And part of the lessons he'd given was about people working together as a team to defend each other – and in order to teach _that_ , Harry'd had to learn how to attack a team as a solo fighter.

Fred and George were good at covering each other's backs, but Ron was the odd man out in their defence, and Harry overwhelmed his shields pretty easily and kicked him off of the duelling stage and so out of the duel. Then he concentrated on the twins, and lured them out of their turtle like shielding by opening himself up for an attack – and when Fred took the bait and went to attack, Harry disarmed him and then used him to knock George off the stage as well.

It was over inside three minutes.

"Again," Harry said, throwing Fred his wand back.

This time they all went instantly on attack, and Harry put his own shielding and his distraction and parrying lessons to use. Bit of flash and smoke and he had what little team work they had utterly separated and then he managed to push George off the stage – which distracted Fred enough for Harry to kick him off as well. Which left Ron, who had _no_ leg work to speak off, and so Harry knocked him off his feet and collected his wand from the floor.

"Again," he said, handing the wand back.

It took eight duels before the Weasleys managed to put together enough team work to defend and attack at the same time, one of them holding up a shield while another attacked and the third kept an eye on any sort of distraction or diversion Harry managed to put up. It was George who finally managed to knock Harry off the stage with a well-placed leg locker while Ron dealt with the smoke Harry had conjured and Fred covered both of them with a shield.

The Weasleys were looking a bit ragged and desperate and their victory seemed to make them even less confident about themselves. "Now we've done it," Ron muttered. "He's gonna kill us now."

"No, this is about enough for now," Harry said with some satisfaction, getting up again and turning to the rest of the D.A. They were all watching, most of them snacking on their Hogsmeade goods – real or duplicated – and some of them taking notes. "Let's talk about one on three fights, and why I beat them so many times before they managed to beat me."

They moved the ship the day after, away from the original asteroid – which they called the Fuel Rock – and to a much bigger one. About fourteen miles across, the new asteroid was almost spherical in shape. It was an m-type asteroid, rich in metals and such, and according to the scans it could replenish 60% of their material stores.

"It doesn't have much water ice, though, so after we replenish our stores, we need to head off to refuel," Hermione said.

"We need better fuel," Lee agreed. "Captain, can I put in a vote for a trip to Jupiter? We could get so much better fuel from a gas giant than most anything we can find around here. Much easier too."

Harry hummed thoughtfully, watching the faint flashes of light on the metal asteroid's surface as the ship beamed away the materials they needed. "Maybe. Can we stock up on materials here? As in get much more than we actually need? What's our capacity anyway?"

Generally the ship carried about thirty tons of variety of materials, but it had the capacity for ten times as much – if they converted some of the laboratories and corridors and whatnot into store rooms.

"It's a pity we don't have any sort of hangar bay," Lee murmured. "But as it is though, we don't use most of the ship anyway – we could easily convert about 50% of it to storage and not really lose much in the process."

"Let's do it," Harry said. "First stock up on whatever we can get here, then we'll make another pit stop somewhere where we can get at least most of the rest. Then we'll head to Jupiter. Do we have enough fuel for that?"

Hermione worked on her console for a moment and then nodded tentatively. "Just barely – though I'd like our chances better if we refuelled before heading to Jupiter."

"Then we'll do that," Harry said. "Start converting the un-used spaces to storage and fill up our stores. And, uh," he sighed. "Get a bit of extra gold if you can, will you?"

"Yes sir," Hermione said with an amused smile.

They moved the D.S.S. Requirement to Jupiter just a little before the Christmas holidays. It was… indescribable. For one, the travel from the asteroid belt to the gas giant was unnervingly fast – it happened about as fast as their recent travels from asteroid to asteroid, just a smooth _slide_ from one point to another, never mind the enormous gap in between. And then…

Then Jupiter was right in front of them, an incredible striped _giant_ just outside the window. It was half in shadow, and the light side almost glowed in the light of the increasingly distant sun, yellow and orange and beige and weird and beautiful.

"Uh," Lee said. "We, uh… we need to go in."

"In?" Harry said.

"Well, at least close enough to beam stuff in. Easiest way would be if we would just… go in."

"Into the actual planet?" Ron asked, wide eyed,

"Well… it's a gas giant," Lee said, making a haphazard motion at the planet outside their window. "So, uh… we could go. In. To it."

"Can the ship handle that?" Harry asked, turning to Hermione. "It looks kind of stormy down there. And possibly corrosive."

"Well, yes, but the ship can probably handle it. And if we fix the fuel situation, it can stay there pretty much indefinitely," Hermione said and glanced at Cho. "And if nothing else, the ship's shields can easily take on any storm Jupiter can throw at us."

Cho nodded in agreement. "Easily," she said. "Though they use up power like nobody's business."

Harry considered them and then the planet. "Do we have to?" he asked. "I don't know about you guys, but the idea of going _into_ the atmosphere of Jupiter kind of freaks me out."

"Well, we _can_ mine from orbit too," Lee said. "It's just a bit harder."

"But safer," Harry said, relaxing a bit.

The rest of their time on board the ship was spent in hurried activity, as Lee and Hermione worked ceaselessly to set up the automated helium-3 mining operation. While the beaming itself wasn't hard, they had to rework the power core again, setting aside the previous hydrogen and oxygen generators and starting to work on nuclear reactors instead.

"It's obsolete technology for whoever build this ship," Lee said. "But thank _Merlin_ they still have the patterns stored in the database. Still, we probably should do an off-ship test before we set up a nuclear reactor in the ship."

"And how do we do an off-ship test?" Harry asked with a frown.

"We conjure a reactor in space," Lee shrugged. "And then fuel it up and turn it on remotely. If it works, we can repurpose the reactor into materials or just beam it into our own core."

"You know what I want to do?" Hermione said while conjuring enormous gas tanks which would eventually hold whatever gasses they would beam up from the gas giant. "I want to make an actual mining platform here. An automated one, hovering just on the edge of Jupiter's atmosphere. That way we wouldn't have to worry about fuel in the future – we could just stop by Jupiter, re-fuel, and be on our way."

"It would be handy for the future," Lee agreed. "If we're ever going to make new ships, that is."

"Hm. For now, let's fuel ourselves. If it works and we don't blow ourselves up, you can start figuring out the mining platform," Harry said, and glanced at Hermione. "Speaking of hovering things, though – how are the hoverboards coming along?"

"What? Oh, I finished those," Hermione said, reaching for another console and moving a couple of control stones on the grid. A moment later, a skateboard-esque device materialised on the conjurator table. "Tada," she said. "It doesn't have any power though."

"Wait, you made a hoverboard – and it doesn't have _any power_?" Lee asked, sounding awed and horrified all at once.

Hermione shrugged. "I haven't had time to work on batteries yet. I figured I should make sure the ship had power first."

Harry shook his head, lifting the hoverboard up. "Well, I suppose it can wait," he said and considered the board. "What's Hogwarts policy on skateboards anyway?"

Hermione smiled. "It doesn't have one. I'm pretty sure wizards don't even know skateboards exists."

"If Umbridge finds out, I bet they'll made illegal," Lee muttered, eying the hover board covetously. "Can I have one too? Please?"

"I'd wait for a next generation if I was you," Hermione said, glancing at the board. "I want to make a version that works in space."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The little kid in me is all over this story, in case it's not obvious.
> 
> Also, D.S.S. stands for Dumbledore's Space Ship and the ship itself is Asgardian. (Because I felt there was enough Ancient stuff happening in HPxSG crossovers. Also runes. And also the Asgard are awesome.)


	6. Chapter 6

Before the start of the Christmas holidays and, thus, the departure of the majority of the D.A. members, they held one last meeting on the bridge. It was a very impressive place to be in now, the bridge – because just below them floated Jupiter, and not just as seen from a distance. The gently arching horizon of the great gas giant stretched from one end of the window to another, showing a mere fraction of the planet and still being larger than life.

"When we come back, I think we need to move," Cho had said when they'd finally managed to put the ship into orbit. "I didn't think it would affect us this bad, but the gravity of Jupiter is a bit too great and we're using a lot of power maintaining orbit. Neptune or Uranus would be a much better place for this."

"Can the ship stay here during the holidays?" Harry asked.

"Well, it can. I've inserted a program that will maintain our position. It just uses a lot of power," Cho shrugged.

"We've automated the refuelling so that we won't run out," Lee added. "Which basically means that the ship is constantly topping itself off. It's kind of wasteful – and we're still using oxygen and hydrogen. But for now, it works."

The ship, while topping itself up on fuel, was also collecting other things. Aside from the vital Helium-3 tanks, Hermione and Lee had conjured up about twenty other tanks, each to be filled up with a variety of important gasses. Helium-3 wasn't all they needed, it turned out – they also needed some other isotopes, mainly deuterium – an isotope of hydrogen, also available on Jupiter, and necessary for helium-3 based nuclear fusion.

"How do you even know all of this stuff?" Harry asked with bewilderment. "I've never even heard of it."

"I keep up with scifi stuff – my mum sends me a lot of muggle science journals from home and new scifi books," Lee shrugged.

"And I try to keep up with our equivalent schooling in the muggle world," Hermione said. "I might've not know about nuclear fusion and whatnot, but I know enough about isotopes and stuff to catch up. Still, a lot of this stuff is available in the ship's database – it gives you all the answers if you go looking for them."

"In ancient runes," Harry said slowly.

"You really should start learning them," Hermione said plainly, giving him a look. "Everyone else is."

Their last meeting was a short and succinct one. "I've got just two orders for those who stay behind," Harry said. "No tinkering with the piloting. And keep an eye out for Umbridge and her goons – a lot of them will be staying in Hogwarts and you can bet they'll be trying to hunt the Room's location down. So be careful."

A hand shot up. "Captain, can we use the conjurator?" Terry Boot asked.

Harry frowned. There'd been a bit of a ban on conjuring and all conjuring projects had gone through Hermione and Lee who could assess the usage of materials and power. Neither of them was staying in Hogwarts. "Do you have something specific in mind?" he asked.

"Actually, yes," Terry said. "I've been thinking about the whole Umbridge trying to hunt us, must keep the Room a secret thing. And I might have a sort of solution for it. But I really need to play around with the conjurator to see if it can actually work."

"And this solution is?"

"I'd rather not say, not unless I can actually make it work."

Harry considered it and then nodded. "Hermione, Lee, can you give some sort of reasonable limit of material and energy usage per person?" he asked.

"Like a balance?" Hermione asked and folded her arms. "Yeah, I guess. We'd need to come up with some sort of system to monitor how much each person has used up, though, that might be tricky."

"We could start using a sort of credit system," Lee said excitedly. "Each person has a certain amount of credits and credits translate to how much materials and power they can use with the conjurator."

"That might take time to figure out though," Hermione said, though she too perked up at the idea. "For now I can set up a sort of limit on the conjurator itself, after which it couldn't be used manually – it would be a general limit to everyone who stays behind, though."

"I'm sure we can keep track of how much everyone uses," Terry said, glancing at the others who were staying behind, all of whom nodded.

"We'll do that then," Harry nodded. "Any other requests? Well then, Lee, if you could?"

Lee nodded and turned to a nearby console. He took the command stone he usually had attached to the chest of his robes, and put it on the console, moving it around a bit. A moment later a flash of white light showed in the centre of the bridge as a neat stack of gold bars appeared.

"Oh my _god_ ," someone whispered, staring at them.

"Two bars per member," Harry said, motioning them to take theirs. "We didn't make them into Galleons because that would be counterfeiting and the Goblins would skewer us. But I'm sure you can figure out something to do with these. Merry Christmas."

They left Hogwarts the next day, boarding the Express and then watching as the castle shrink in the windows. Harry felt more than little uneasy leaving the ship behind – even if he wasn't, actually, the ship wasn't actually in Hogwarts, it was at Jupiter. Still, Hogwarts was how they got there, and anything might happen to the Room while they weren't there.

Not that he wasn't happy to be going to Grimmauld Place and seeing Sirius and the others. It was just… the D.S.S. Requirement had become a home for him. He slept most nights there, in the barracks someone had set up by conjuring up rows and rows of bunk beds in a couple of the rooms. It, while not being exactly _homey_ , was safe in a way only home could be. More so than Hogwarts was right now. Maybe more so than it would ever again be.

"You know," Ron said, turning one of his gold bars in his hand. "I'm pretty sure that ship is the real thing. Not just something made up by the Room."

"Yeah," Harry agreed morosely, rubbing at his forehead. It was starting to hurt again.

"I wish I'd had more time before we left," Hermione sighed. "I would've loved to turn some of the gold into jewellery for mum. She would've loved it."

"So, we're moderately wealthy now, we're going home, seeing family and loved ones," Ron said, and pointed a thumb at Harry. "Why the gloom?"

"Captain doesn't like leaving his ship behind," Hermione grinned, and nudged Harry's shoulder. "Come on, sir. Bit of shore leave should do us good."

Harry just sighed.

The D.A. members said their goodbyes on the train, and while Hermione headed off with her parents, Ron, Fred, George, Ginny and Harry went Tonks and Lupin, who met them at the platform. "Let's be quick about this," Tonks said. "The less time we spend out in the open, the better."

Grimmauld Place hadn't much changed. It was a bit cleaner now, there was a bit more light, but aside from that it still had a dusty, gloomy atmosphere – which was so much more apparent, when compared to the airy, open spaces of the D.S.S. Requirement. Still, it was good to see Sirius again – who greeted Harry with a tight hug very nearly right at the doorsteps of Grimmauld Place.

And then they heard about Mr. Weasley.

"We didn't want to alarm you," Sirius said. "Or anybody else, so we didn't send word. As it is we don't know much yet."

Mr. Weasley was in hospital, due to an unspecified accident that had happened. He'd been there for a couple of days now, with healers working on him non-stop – and apparently, it was still uncertain if he would make it.

"What?" Ginny whispered, shocked.

"Now I'm sure it will be alright," Sirius hurried to say. "Your mother's with him, and they're doing all they can to help. Now, how about we get you settled…"

Harry wasn't sure what was worse – that they hadn't been told that Mr. Weasley was hurt, or that Sirius and the others refused to tell them how it had happened. It obviously had something to do with the Order of the Phoenix – something Harry had been happy to forget while on the D.S.S. Requirement. The exclusion and avoidance by Sirius and the others was oddly jarring – but what was more jarring was the sudden and intense annoyance and indignation he felt over it.

The calm he hadn't even realised he'd found on the ship was very abruptly gone, and he felt vaguely sick at the loss.

"They should've told us. _They should've told us_ ," Fred muttered. "It's our dad and they just… _you_ just ignored us."

"Just because of this dumb Order and whatnot," George muttered darkly.

"Your father was injured in the line of duty," Sirius answered almost harshly. "He knew – he _knows_ there are things that are worth dying for."

"Easy for you to say – you haven't even left Grimmauld Place, have you? You're safe here, while our dad is out there, risking his life –"

Harry listened to them for a while, as Ron and Ginny demanded to see their dad or their mum or anybody who would actually give them answers. After a moment he had to pull himself away from the discussion and find a nice empty corner to breathe in, just to keep himself from shouting at all of them. His head was hurting and his eyes were blurry and he was just… so angry.

Angry at the Order for excluding them, for getting Mr. Weasley hurt – angry at Sirius for not telling him, even though they'd been exchanging letters. Angry at the whole thing – angry at the possibility that other people might be hurt. That Sirius might be hurt. Angry at Voldemort, whom he hadn't even thought of for a long while now. Angry at everything.

"H'lo there, Harry," a familiar voice said. "You okay there?"

"Peachy," Harry answered, rubbing at his forehead and glancing back at Tonks who was watching him worriedly. "When will we know more about Mr. Weasley?" he asked, trying to calm down.

"Later today, we hope," she said, still looking at him worriedly. "What's that on your chest? Looks… wicked."

Harry glanced down. It was a communication slash command stone from the D.S.S. Requirement. They all wore one, these days – it was easier to communicate through them, than the fake Galleons Hermione had made for the D.A. "Just a pin," Harry answered, touching the stone and wishing that he was still in Hogwarts, on the D.S.S. Requirement, where things were easy and cool and soothing.

They did find out about Mr. Weasley later that day. Mrs. Weasley came back to Grimmauld Place with an exhausted, hopeless look on his face. "They… managed to stabilise him, somewhat," she answered, wiping her eyes and trying to look like she hadn't been crying. "He's… he's in a coma. It's the best they could do."

"But what happened?" George asked desperately. "What happened to him?"

"It's Order business," she answered tiredly. "Please don't ask."

That was all they got out of the Order members, who gently but firmly pushed the children aside and kept them at a distance – for their own protection, supposedly. Harry watched exhaustedly while George, Fred, Ron and Ginny all raged about it, trying to come up with ways to spy on the Order meetings.

"There is a way," he said then. "A very easy way. If you really want to know what they're talking about."

"We _really_ do want to know," they almost shouted at him.

With a shake of his head, he took the communication stone from his chest and held it up. "Put it somewhere where they won't find it," he said simply. "And you can listen in all you want."

"Don't you want to know what they're talking about?" Ginny demanded.

"Don't you care?" Ron asked.

"I do," Harry answered. "I really, really do. It's just my head is _pounding_. I don't know what it is about this place, but I feel sick all the time."

"You feel sick, captain?" a voice came from the stone – Cho Chang.

"Where _are_ you that's making you sick?" someone else asked – sounded like Ernie McMillan.

"And why do you guys need to spy on someone?" Lee Jordan asked. "Who are you spying on?"

"Oh. I guess I activated the general communications," Harry murmured, eying the stone blearily. "Sorry about that."

Ginny, Fred and George exchanged a look while Ron looked at Harry closely. "You look terrible, Harry," he noticed.

"Thanks," Harry grunted.

"Why does he look terrible?" Hermione's voice asked from the stone, sounding alarmed. "What happened? Harry, are you alright?"

Soon everyone in the D.A. was piping up with questions and well wishes through their communication stones. It made Harry feel a little better – but not by much. The voices were making his headache worse.

"Where does it hurt, captain?" a soft voice asked through the cacophony and Harry tried to concentrate on it.

"The scar, mostly," Harry answered, and everyone quieted down, with the Weasleys eying Harry worriedly.

"When did it begin, captain?" the voice asked again, and Harry recognized it. Luna Lovegood.

"When we came here," Harry answered, now frowning. "No, it started when we left Hogwarts, it got worse here. Much worse here."

"You know what; screw this – Dad's in hospital in a coma. I'm sorry, captain, but I just –" Ginny said and marched off, snatching her own stone off her chest and tinkering with it as she went, probably changing the settings to one way communication.

Fred and George followed her, and Ron looked between Harry and them, looking divided. Harry waved at him. "Go, go," he said. "Never mind me. Worry about your dad."

"Sorry," Ron said, squeezed Harry's shoulder tightly and then followed his siblings, leaving Harry alone – alone, except for the rest of the D.A. who were now tuned in.

For some reason, they let Luna talk Harry through his headache, a few of them piping up with suggestions like getting a cold cloth, going into a dark room and maybe silencing himself so that he couldn't hear anything, things like that. Harry followed a couple of the suggestions and lay down with an icy wet towel on his forehead – and it helped, some. But not entirely.

"You get headaches from You Know Who, though, don't you?" Cho asked softly.

"He does," Hermione agreed when Harry just sighed.

"Could You Know Who be near him?"

"I doubt it," Harry answered. "This place is secure. Not as secure as the ship, but pretty damn secure."

There was a moment of thoughtful silence. "I get that you can't tell us where you are," Zacharias said slowly. "Because of security reasons or whatever. But maybe there's something _there_ that's making you ill? If it got worse _there_ then logically it's something to do with that place."

"Or Voldemort is really, really mad for some reason," Harry mumbled.

"Is he?" Luna asked calmly.

Harry considered it and then sighed. "I don't know."

"Well, did you feel that bad before you went there, whatever that place is?" Zacharias asked. "Did you feel that bad on the train, on the platform?"

"… No. Not really."

"Then there's something there that's making you sick. You need to find it, and do something about it," the Hufflepuff said with finality.

"Do you think you can do that?" Hermione asked worriedly.

"I don't know… how would I be able to _find_ it?" Harry asked with a sigh, rubbing his forehead through the towel.

"Do you think you can do spells there?" Lee asked. "Or can someone else there do spells for you? If yes, then try a point me charm. Who knows – it might work."

Harry considered it for a moment and then forced himself to sit up. "I'll try it," he said. Since they were under a Fidelius, he probably could do spells without the Ministry finding out. At that moment, his head hurt so much that he really didn't care if he did piss the Ministry off or not. "I'll get back to you later. Harry out."

"Good luck, captain," Luna said, just as Harry turned the communication off. Harry eyed the stone for a long moment and then sighed. He really, really wished he was still on the ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very little space in this one :(
> 
> (Also because Harry's been sleeping on board the ship mostly, he's avoided visions and whatnot. Horcrux connection no work at those distances. Why not? Because I don't want to deal with the whole vision thing or Voldemort or anything. I just want space.)


	7. Chapter 7

Harry received a package later that very same evening as he and the others had arrived at Grimmauld Place. It was addressed "To Whom It Concerns" and it was, on the surface, full of about half a hundred stuffed toys. They were all identical down to the slightly shoddy seams here and there and mismatched eyes, and to the piece of yarn hanging from the left, furry arm.

"Oh, this is very cute," Harry said, examining the box. "Whose idea were the stuffed toys?"

"Mine, captain," Lavender Brown said via the communication stone. "I figured that since Mr. Weasley is in hospital, you might be visiting it this Christmas. The toys might make a good gift. Plus, Umbridge was a little less likely to dig into a box full of toys around Christmas time."

"Is it there?" Terry Boot asked urgently.

A box of solid silver was hidden under all the furry toys. It wasn't very big, about six inches by six inches, and aside from the fact that it was made from solid silver, it was pretty simplistic, there were no carvings or patterns, just clean lines and sharp edges, hinges on one side and a slot for a padlock on the other.

"It's here," Harry said, taking the box out. It might not be very artistic, but considering that it had been made less than four hours ago and from very nearly nothing, it was amazing. "Do you really think this will do the trick, guys?"

"Silver is a natural repellent of magic," Zacharias Smith answered through the stone. "Especially dark magic – that's why most dark creatures can't stand it, it's like acid to the magic inside them. If it doesn't do the trick, I'll be very surprised.

"If it doesn't, we'll try a lead box next," Hermione said sternly. "And if that doesn't work, then we'll send you a container of acid."

Harry hummed and stood up, hiding the box under his robe. Then he grabbed his invisibility cloak. "I'm going to try it. Stand by, guys."

The rest of Grimmauld Place was asleep – except for those who were on night watch duty, which that night seemed to be Professor Lupin. Harry avoided him easily though, thanks to the fact that the Order members usually stuck to the first floor when on duty, and Harry's task was on the second.

Quietly, he snuck to the cabinet where he'd found it, the damn thing that was giving him so much trouble. He set the box down and opened it quietly to reveal a four inch by four inch space inside and a strange pattern on the lid and the box's edge, which would shut to a sort of interwoven seam – probably designed to make sure the seam held. After a moment of consideration, Harry picked up the fire poker from the nearby fireplace. Then, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the thing, he manoeuvred the locket's chain onto the tip of the fire poker.

It seemed to last forever, and his head was pounding trice as hard as it had done previously. His hand shook and the poker felt, for a moment, impossibly heavy. Then, with a clatter of metal that seemed to echo into infinity, the locket dropped into the box and it took all of Harry's concentration not to just throw the poker away and slam the box shut, noise be damned.

By the time he got the box shut, his palms were sweating and he was shivering – and then abruptly, as if cut by a knife, the pressure on his head eased. The pain was still there, but it was quickly fading into a dull, distant throb. "I did it," he breathed. "It worked. Oh, thank _Merlin_ , it worked. Shush," he quickly hissed when someone cheered. "Wait a moment; I'll get back to my room."

"Do you have a lock for the box?" Hermione whispered through the stone.

"No, but I'll figure something out," Harry whispered back, and snuck back into his room so that he could thank his crew for their hard work and ingenuity. He never would've thought of silver without Zacharias, and thank Merlin someone had stayed behind on the ship, too, to actually conjure the box.

 Once in his room, he sealed the box as well as he could and wrapped it in his Invisibility Cloak just in case before pushing it to the very bottom of his trunk. "I need a more secure trunk," he murmured, eying the thing. It had a lock on it, but it was a lock a first year could open with a spell. Whatever the damn locket was, he would've felt far more secure if it was held behind much sturdier protections than a simple lock.

"I think something can be arranged, captain," Terry Boot answered thoughtfully.

The next day he woke up to a _howl_ as the house elf of Grimmauld Place utterly lost his mind. It was quickly followed by Sirius shouting at the elf to shut the hell up. Harry listened for a moment with a wince and then went around the room where the noise was coming from and headed to the kitchen instead. That day, they'd visit Mr. Weasley in the magical hospital, St. Mungo's, and the atmosphere was distinctly gloomy.

Ginny and her brothers had managed to spy on a discussion that had explained what had happened to Mr. Weasley. Though the details hadn't been discussed, it seemed that Mr. Weasley had been attacked by a snake while out in duty guarding… something. He'd very nearly died – there was still a chance that he would die. The snake hadn't been just venomous – it was also magical and something about the venom made it very hard to heal the bites, not to mention about counteracting the venom itself. None of the anti-venoms St. Mungo's had tried had quite worked on it.

Mr. Weasley wasn't actually in a coma. He was in stasis, completely frozen so that none of his bodily functions was working, nothing from breathing to heart beat. It was all they had been able to do, to keep him alive. They only brought him out of the stasis to try a new treatment, and then put him back into it.

None of the Weasley children had said much, after finding out about that. Harry couldn't say much either. There was pretty much nothing they could do.

"Well then," Mrs. Weasley said with false cheer that echoed hollow and tired. "Let's get going then."

They made the trip by fireplace and they made such a gloomy gathering that the witch behind the counter seemed to instantly know who they were there for, and just pointed them to the sixth floor – the Critical Magical Treatments ward, usually out of bounds for visitors along with the floors from seven up, which had to do with contagious illnesses.

They only saw Mr. Weasley through a window – the entire room he was in was sealed off, and the healer there had a bubble head charm. Apparently, the room didn't have a breathable atmosphere, but a cocktail of potions fumes that were meant to keep in conditions demanded by the stasis spell.

No one said anything at the sight of Mr. Weasley, pale and deathly still on the bed inside the room, blood stained bandages all over him.

"I-is he going to make it?" Ginny asked in choked whisper.

Mrs. Weasley opened her mouth with a smile, obviously intending to reassure her. Nothing came out though. There was nothing really to say – no assurance anyone could give, no comfort. Mr. Weasley was literally suspended on the brink of death and, despite Mrs. Weasley's and the Order's attempts to conceal it, they all knew.

Harry looked at his friends, his crew, and after a resting hand on each shoulder for a moment, he slipped away quietly. He waked outside the ward to the corridor leading to the lift, and after a breath he took out the command stone.

"Have we found anything medicine related on the ship?" he asked with a shuddering breath.

There was a moment of silence. "We haven't really looked," Lee then answered.

"Is Mr. Weasley that bad?" Hermione asked quietly.

"He's worse," Harry said, glancing at the closed door leading back to the ward. "Can we put medicine research somewhere in our agenda?" he asked. "Just… just in case there's something."

"You got it, captain," Angelina Johnson said. "We'll start look into it, first thing when we get back to school."

"Thank you."

Then a tentative voice cleared his throat. "You're in St. Mungo's, captain?" Neville Longbottom asked.

"Yeah," Harry answered.

"I'm… on the fourth floor. Long term resident's ward."

Harry hesitated and then nodded. "I'm on my way. Harry out."

He found Neville sitting by a pair of beds, one of which was holding a sleeping, wispy haired woman, and on the other there was a man, staring wide eyed and blank faced at the ceiling. Neville was holding both their hands gently, and the man was squeezing back so hard his knuckles were white. It must've hurt.

"Hi Neville," Harry said.

"Captain," Neville said with a smile that was more a wince really. He nodded at the man and the woman. "My parents. Alice and Frank Longbottom."

"It's an honour," Harry said honestly, albeit quietly.

"You knew?" Neville asked nervously.

"I've heard about it, yeah," Harry said. "I'm sorry."

Neville nodded, swallowing dryly. "I just… I wouldn't, I mean. I don't…." he stopped and frowned, taking a breath. "I don't want pity or anything, but… i-if we're looking into medicine, on the ship – it can do so many amazing things. I thought… Maybe we could…"

"Yes, of course," Harry said sternly. "Absolutely we can look into this, too."

Neville nodded. "N-not that I'm holding any hopes. Just… if there is anything…" he sighed and bowed his head.

Harry sat with Neville until his grandmother came, and then Harry was introduced to the woman. She had a pinched, wearily proud look on her face as she spoke of her son and his wife, their career as Aurors, their brilliance. The further she went on, the more Neville seemed to fold into himself, shrinking under the accomplishments of his parents.

Apparently the litany was something he heard often.

Watching it, Harry made a mental note to do something for Neville once they were back in Hogwarts, and he was out of his grandmother's severe presence. Right now thought the best he could do was to offer his condolences, squeeze Neville's shoulder tightly, and wish him a merry Christmas.

It was a very gloomy Christmas in Grimmauld Place. It was hard to find cheer when Mr. Weasley was stuck in stasis in a hospital, and even the more cheerful members of the Order of the Phoenix could do little to cheer up his children. Even the Christmas gifts didn't cheer anyone up – they were opened silently and solemnly, examined and then set aside.

"This place is like a damn mausoleum," Sirius said gloomily. "I'd hoped that maybe… but no. I guess not."

Harry looked at him steadily for a moment. "Their dad might die, Sirius," he said quietly.

Sirius sighed and nodded guiltily. "Well, what did you think of your gift?" he asked.

"The two-way mirror?" Harry asked. "It seems useful. I actually have something similar for you. Here," he said, holding out a small, somewhat hastily wrapped up box. "Open it."

Sirius arched his eyebrows with surprise and opened the box, to reveal a smooth, vaguely triangular stone. A communication stone from the D.S.S. Requirement – not that he knew it. "I'm guessing this is not a pet rock?" he said, holding it up.

"It's a communication stone," Harry said, taking his from his pocket. "It's something me and my mates figured out how to make. Tap it like this, and then you can talk into it, and I'll hear it through mine."

Sirius blinked and tapped the rock, and then made a "blaah," sound at it, which echoed out of Harry's rock.

Sirius's stone was different from Harry's in that it was really only a one-way communication stone, completely stripped of all of it other features. The thing about the D.S.S. Requirement communication stones was that they were actually mini computers, each capable of holding more information in them than the best human super computer, probably more than all of humanity's computers combined – according to Lee and Hermione anyway. They could be interfaced with every command platform on the ship, transferring data – programs, patterns and so on – from one console to another. The communication feature in them was really just a side quirk – their main function was data storage.

They would probably eventually be used in the credit system Lee had suggested for the conjurator – and then the stones would work as the D.A.'s ship borne credit cards as well.

"Well, it's very handy," Sirius said. "Much easier to hide than a two way mirror anyway. I'd wondered why you guys were walking around with these things."

"They have their uses," Harry said, looking at him thoughtfully. "You… will use it if you get into trouble, right?" he asked. "I'd rather you not end up like Mr. Weasley."

"I'll do my best," Sirius promised solemnly.

The general mood hadn't much improved by the time they were meant to return to Hogwarts – the Weasleys were still gloomy and quiet, and even the idea of returning to the ship didn't much cheer them up. Harry didn't try to comfort them – at this point it would just annoy them – and instead made quiet plans to somehow distract them. Maybe… he could give them duties on board the ship, something to keep their minds off it.

Hermione joined Ron and him in their compartment once they reached the train, and every D.A. member who'd been home for the holidays stopped by to say hello. Much to Harry's dismay, a _lot_ of them had written "extra credit essays" for him, a lot of them full of suggestions about things they could do once they made it to the ship again.

"Have you thought about the batteries?" Harry asked Hermione as he went over the essays. Lots of them had to do with muggle gadgetry. The command stones – unlike your usual muggle technology – worked inside Hogwarts, after all. So a lot of muggleborns and half-bloods in the D.A. were hoping that maybe conjuring up versions of things like, say, TVs and VCRs and maybe gaming consoles, could make it so that they'd work in the school.

"Well, a little," Hermione said. "I've been mostly thinking of the next version of the hoverboard. Mind you, we'd need space suits to actually use them outside the ship."

"I think the twins were working on something like space suits," Ron said dully, staring out of the window. "I mean… before."

Harry nodded slowly. "Did they manage to make anything yet?"

"I dunno. Ask them."

Harry did. The twins made an effort to drag themselves out of their gloom to explain their idea. They'd looked into what muggle space suits had looked like and then tried to figure out a magical version of them – which would involve a lot of environmental charms. Then they'd attempted to figure out a tech version of it – and it turned out that the database on board the D.S.S. Requirement did have records of closed environment suits.

"All we really need to do is put in size and anatomy requirements – what temperature is ideal and what we breathe – and then we can conjure as many suits we want," George said.

"We were working on trying to make them look cool," Fred shrugged. "The first one we conjured was pretty weird looking. And now we think, well… maybe…"

"We want to armour them," George said with a frown. "Make them as strong as we can. And then, maybe… give or sell them or something – just get them to the Order members. So that they don't… end up like Dad."

"Ah," Harry said and considered it. "Have you talked it over with Lee?"

"Yeah, he promised to look at Muggle stuff, what armour muggles use and stuff. He said something about carbon tubes?"

"Carbon _nano_ tubes," George corrected his brother. "And polymers. And kevlar – or something like that."

"Ah," Harry said thoughtfully. "Let me know when you have something," he said. "I rather think we're all going to need some armour before long," he added thoughtfully and wondered to himself about the shields of the D.S.S. Requirement. They could, according to the data, hold up against weapons fire. How would they hold up against spell fire? And if they did… could they be miniaturised in any way?

"Captain?" Fred asked. "Are we going to fight him?"

Harry looked at him and sighed. "With my track record? I'd say the chances are high we'll have to, at some point," he said darkly. "I guess… it's time we start really looking into how we can take advantage of the ship and its benefit when it comes to that, too. We've played around enough. It's time to gear up and get ready for this war."


	8. Chapter 8

Those members of the D.A. that had remained in Hogwarts – and on D.S.S. Requirement – hadn't sat idle. Especially not after word of Mr. Weasley and the ensuing debate about what had happened and why. Pretty much everyone in the D.A. now suspected that Mr. Weasley had gotten hurt – almost killed – while somehow fighting Voldemort or at least his forces and that had a very clear impact on everyone.

"Okay, captain, here it is," Terry Boot said and handed Harry a device. "The idea I mentioned and why I wanted permission to use the conjurator."

"And this is?" Harry asked, turning it in his hand. It was like a command stone, but not quite – the stone part of it was fairly small, set into a triangular metal frame, though the triangle's corners had been cut off so it was more of an irregular hexagon really.

"Put it on your chest and tap the stone," Terry said, eagerly.

"Is it going to blow me up?" Harry asked, even while setting the thing on the centre of his chest where it stuck to him with the strange magnetism the command and communication stones did. According to Lee it had something to do with personal electromagnetic fields, or auras, as wizards knew them as.

The device didn't blow him up. The moment Harry tapped the stone, a rippling field of… not quite light, it wasn't exactly luminous, but if light had a physical form, it might've been like that. It was like liquid, running up and down and enveloping Harry entirely. Then…

Then he was invisible.

"The ship has its own invisibility cloak, of sorts," Terry explained while everyone stared at the spot where Harry had been – still was, just no one could see him. "I can't make heads or tails of the science, it has something to do with bending light or something like that. It took some work, but I managed to, well… miniaturise it."

"How is it powered?" Hermione asked, sounding fascinated. "How long can it last?"

"It has the same sort of micro power source as the command stones do – which is to say, it kind of sucks. The cloak uses a lot more power than your usual communications so while you can talk pretty much forever through the command stones, the cloak… well. It has enough juice for about three hours of invisibility, before it runs out," Terry admitted. "It's just a prototype. Still, it could be a viable way of getting our people in and out of the ship without anyone ever noticing it."

"Oh, this is… this is _very_ cool," Harry said, taking the cloak… triangle… thing off his chest and looking at it with admiration. "This is the final version – after you figure out the power situation, this is how it's going to look?"

"Well, I dunno. I just wanted to put all the components into one place, so I could see how it worked. It's basically just a display version," Terry said modestly and patted his own command stone. "Now that I have the necessary components down, I could probably make it into pretty much anything."

"Very, very cool," Harry murmured, turning the cloak device in his hands. "What else have you been working on?"

"Well, we made a basic secure container," Terry said and motioned to a bunch of metallic looking trunks sitting nearby. "They can only be opened when the right command stone is placed on the lid. We're still working on the security functions – so far they're resistant to alohamora just because the locking mechanism is so complicated that a spell can't just flip a tumbler and unlock it. But more complicated lock picking spells can probably open them, so… it's still a work in progress."

"Hmm… better concentrate on the invisibility cloak device first," Harry said, handing the device back. "How long do you think it will take before we can conjure a cloak for every D.A. member at least?"

"That depends how long it will take to figure out the power source," Terry admitted.

"I might have some ideas about that," Hermione said. "I've been thinking of batteries for another project."

"You two work together," Harry said. "Now, has anyone else got anything else to display? In that case, I have something to say to you all. Is everyone here?"

They were – and Harry could've sworn some of them actually stood at attention to listen, a couple with their hands clasped behind their backs, all with attentive looks on their faces. It was… oddly gratifying and a bit worrying. But for now, he let it slide.

"In light of recent events I'd like to introduce a sort of agenda for… well, I suppose for the crew of D.S.S. Requirement," Harry said, and saw a lot of chins tilt up proudly at the sound of that. "We have a lot of opportunities here that no one else has; we have knowledge and manufacturing capabilities like no one else on Earth has. It's time we put it to use. As of now, I'd like to prioritise equipment, items and any sort of devices that might ensure the protection and safety of D.A. members."

Harry motioned to Terry. "The invisibility cloak device is a damn good start and an example of what I mean," he said. "I want a lot more like it. Shields, armour, hell, if you can come up with an instant bandage or healing device, that would be splendid. Just anything you can think of which might save your or your mates' hide in a fight or war or… any sort of terrible situation. Any questions?"

Marietta Edgecombe's hand shot up. "Are we going to war with the Ministry, sir?" she asked worriedly.

Harry looked at her levelly and then at every other worried looking person. "As much as the Ministry seems like it wants to be our enemy, I'm actually thinking Voldemort and his people. Still, anyone here who isn't prepared to go to war, doesn't have to," he said. "I am not making an actual army here. I just want you guys safe. And if in the meantime we come up with, say, a body armour that can withstand spell fire? One which we might be able to hand over to those people who _are_ actually going to war? That would be nice."

"You are going to go to war, though, aren't you, captain?" Ron asked quietly.

"Most likely yeah," Harry said and shrugged. "But I'm not looking to drag anyone with me. No one who doesn't want to come, anyway."

The meeting disbanded soon after that, everyone looking thoughtful and worried. Harry wasn't sure if it was intentional on their part or not, but soon he was left alone on the bridge, and the last person to leave even shut the door after them, leaving him in solitude.

It was just him, and the vast expanse of Jupiter outside the window – and slowly, Harry finally begun to relax.

Whether it was his little speech and request or something else – the D.A. began concentrating even more heavily on D.S.S. Requirement and its manufacturing capabilities. There was an atmosphere of seriousness about the D.A. now, even those members of the D.A. that hadn't previously done much around the ship began to chip in. _Everyone_ was learning ancient runes now, with text books and dictionaries easily conjured on the ship, and all notes eagerly shared.

Even Harry started to learn the runes and he had to admit, he should've started months ago.

 A couple days into the spring term, Cho took the ship out of Jupiter's orbit and they moved to Neptune instead, changing an impressive orange landscape of the great gas giant to the almost soothing blue visage of Neptune. Even with the sun being so much futher than before, the ice giant still glowed against the blackness of space, and it made a visual that was in no way less impressive than those they'd seen before.

The idea of Neptune was that they could stay there much more easily than they could at Jupiter – the gravity strain was less and they could mine Neptune's various moons for most of the materials they needed. And, if necessary, they could move to the Kuiper belt and mine its asteroids instead. At Neptune, they could concentrate less on the matter of _getting_ materials, and more on what to do with the materials they had.

"At this rate, we're all going to fail our O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s and all other classes, too," Hermione commented, when she finally produced a battery she deemed good enough for all their mobile energy needs. It was about the size of a person's finger and could store about enough energy to power a medium sized city for a week – and one of their personal cloaks for about a year. Hermione was nothing if not thorough.

"Will we?" Harry asked, while eying the battery. He had no idea what had been put into its creation but he was sure he could probably destroy a lot of things with it. It was rather terrifying.

"Lots of us are skipping classes, you know," Hermione said. "Very few of us are doing our homework. Funny thing is, you don't need to actually learn anything to graduate from Hogwarts – you can fail every single class, and you can still graduate. It'll just make your life very difficult later. Or would, if… well."

"If what?" Harry asked, handing the battery prototype back.

"If the ship didn't exist," Hermione shrugged and gave him a look. "Tell me, captain, what will you be when you… grow up?"

Harry paused at that and then frowned. "Oh," he said.

"Trust me, it's the same for a _lot_ of us here," Hermione said and turned to her console. "It's sort of up to you whether or not it will work, though."

While Hermione moved to work with Lee on the matter of turning D.S.S. Requirement from rocket fuel power to nuclear power – they now had more helium-3 than they strictly speaking needed, about a hundred times that was available on the entirety of _Earth_ even – others grabbed her battery design and ran with it. With the battery George and Fred managed to, after a couple of weeks of testing, produce a first prototype of their spacesuit.

"It wasn't the spacesuit which was the problem," George admitted. "We had the patterns of a working spacesuit right from the start. But it was… this one is more functional."

They presented the prototype to Harry by actually conjuring a spacesuit specifically made for him. The process of making one – now that the patterns were ready – was fairly simple if somewhat mortifying. It included a number of body scans that had to be done naked while making _poses_ to insure that the suit would fit and function with his body's available range of mobility. Once those scans had been done, the suit was simply conjured to those specifications and after that Harry just had to pull it on.

"You're kidding me," Harry said, at the first sight of the finished spacesuit. "That's not a spacesuit. That's a _wetsuit_."

"Wonders of nanoengineering," Lee said, grinning. "Pull it on, captain."

With some private – and probably plainly obvious – embarrassment, Harry pulled the suit on. The prototype they'd made was completely white without visible seams aside from the one in the front that ran from the side of the throat along the shoulder, dipping underneath it before running down to the waist. It made it easy to pull the thing on, and the thing was so form fitting that honestly, Harry felt pretty much naked wearing it. The thing didn't have boots as much as it had socks that were an integrated part of the rest of the suit, and they fit like a, well, glove. Which the suit had, too, and which were also form fitted.

It was all very strange and a bit alarming.

"I look ridiculous," Harry murmured, once it was on him, the side opening sealing itself cleanly shut with some other wonder of _nanoengineering_ apparently. He wiggled his fingers in their perfectly fitting gloves and then ran his hand over his neck and the underside of his chin. The neck line of the suit came up to his ears, wrapping itself tight around the underside of his skull and jaw. It was just… weird how well it fit. "How is this supposed to be a spacesuit? I have _clothes_ thicker than this! How is this supposed to protect me from anything."

"Like I said, nanoengineering," Lee grinned.

"It's made of layers," George explained. "And it's pretty much nanoscopic machinery all throughout. The bottom layer will absorb your sweat and expels it into its appropriate container. The next layer regulates temperature and basically cools you down so you don't fry. The third layer is the counter pressure layer which maintains the optimal pressure. Then comes the central core layer which is made of basically nanoscopic muscle all through out and it gives the rest of the suit its form and rigidity, and so on. The outer layers – of which there are eight – protect you from the elements, say, radiation and whatnot."

  Harry stared at him. "Nanoscopic machinery?" he asked slowly.

"The reason muggle spacesuits are so bulky is because, A, they tend to use gas to pressurise the suits, which we do with counter pressure, which makes skin tight suit not just easy but necessary," George added. "And B, they can't do things as efficiently as this ship can. They use water tubes to cool down the person in the suit, you know."

"Huh," Harry answered. "So. Is there a helmet?"

"Yes, though you need to take off your glasses for this bit."

Of course, it didn't look anything like an astronaut's helmet. Hell, it didn't even look like a motorcycle helmet. It was much thinner and fit Harry's head like a glove. It was fitted against the back of Harry's head snugly, after which plates extended from it to basically grab Harry's head by the forehead and the ears. Then the visor more or less materialised, arching from the rest of the helmet and forming a single solid piece of… something in front of Harry's face.

"Oh, this is very cool," Harry said, tapping it the visor. It was so clear that it was as if it wasn't even there, and the helmet constricted neither his movement nor his field of vision. "Or it would be if I could _see_ anything. Can't I wear my glasses with this?"

"You don't need to," George said, scanning Harry's glasses with the conjurator table and then putting their specks onto his command stone. Then he placed the stone for a moment right in front of Harry's face.

A moment later, the visor, whatever it was or however it was made, shifted – and suddenly, Harry could see as clear as he could with glasses.

"Okay. Now I'm impressed," he said, wide eyed as he looked at the suddenly much sharper world around him.

"The visor is made of nanoscopic machinery, too," Fred said, grinning like a lunatic. "They're stored in the helmet base and form into a grid when the helmet is activated. They're polycrystalline in structure and so small you can't see them – they're basically glass machines. And since they're machines, we can program things like, well, prescriptions into them."

"So your helmet has built in eye glasses in it," George said with a grin. "It also reacts to environmental factors like sunlight, and will darken to protect your vision and whatnot in space."

"Alright," Harry said, looking around. "I still feel butt naked here, but all right. How am I breathing though?"

"Right now you're breathing the ship's air, we haven't hooked in the life support system yet," George said and conjured up a new machine – a sort of triangular white shell, about the size of a dinner plate. "In this you have enough air for about twenty hours, the battery power for about a year and all other things you need," George said and then placed the thing on Harry's back, where it sealed itself into the suit.

The suit reacted immediately – feeling even tighter and form fitting than before, as well as a bit more rigid. What little sweat that had managed to gather on Harry's skin vanished, absorbed by the suit.

"It includes waste disposal," Fred said. "I don't suggest pissing yourself, but if you need to, the suit can take care of it."

"Nice to know," Harry grimaced, holding out his hands and then examining himself. "So right now I'm living on the suit's life support?"

"Yep," George nodded.

"And I could hop out of the spaceship if I wanted to?" Harry specified. "And I'd survive?"

"I wouldn't suggest it before we figure out how you can actually move out there. Hop out now and you might end up just flying off into space," Lee said. "Hermione's hover board is probably our best bet for moving around in space, and she hasn't finished it yet. But yeah, aside from that you could survive in space right now."

"Still, the suit isn't finished yet. We're hoping to add some sort of display onto the helmet which will inform you on the suit's condition and stuff," George added. "And after that, armour."

"Armour?" Harry asked.

"We're going to add armoured plates onto it," Fred nodded. "Which will snap onto the suit like the command stones do. We're still working on them. But this is the basic idea – we'll be working up from this and adding features."

"Hmm, well, it seems functional," Harry said, squeezing his fists open and shut. "Does it have to be white, though?"

"Well, it doesn't have to be. Muggles use white suits because white absorbs the least amount of light, so the suits don't heat as much," Lee said. "We have much more efficient cooling and shielding, so… it could be any colour you wanted it to be, really."

"We can make your suit Gryffindor red, if you want?" George suggested with a grin. "Everyone can have their suit in house colours if they want it."

"Hm. Maybe," Harry said, wiggling his fingers. "So, can I use my wand with this?"

"You should be able to, same as any other wizard wearing gloves. Have a try," Fred said and Harry did – and it turned out, he could.

"Sweet," he murmured, levitating his now rather old fashioned glasses around without any problems. "Make it so that I can actually use a loo in this and I might start wearing this thing regularly."

"You got it, captain," George grinned.

Harry returned rather regretfully to using his old glasses and was wondering about the armoured plates the twins and Lee were planning when Marietta Edgecombe approached him with a request for a private chat. She looked so worried and troubled that Harry didn't even hesitate, and they retreated to one of the store rooms which was full of gas tanks to talk.

"Captain, you need a private office," she said, looking around. "Audience chamber, cabin, something. This is just sad."

"Maybe. But I'm thinking that's not what you want to talk about," Harry said, looking at her.

She hesitated, squirming a bit. "Alright, here's the thing," she said then in a rush. "My mum works at the Ministry."

"Okay," Harry said slowly.

"Well… the thing is, she saw my command stone and so I told her about the D.A. – not about D.S.S. Requirement because that's… that's something else. But I told her about the lessons and she knows that the Ministry has banned student clubs, and… she's… she's telling me to quit, to tell Umbridge about you guys," Marietta said hastily, and then looked at her toes. "And, uh… if it was just the D.A…. I might've done it, too. B-but it isn't. And…"

Harry waited for a moment after she'd trailed away and after it seemed like she wasn't about to say anything else, he cleared his throat. "Is you mum's job at risk?"

"Maybe?" Marietta winced. "She's just a low level clerk, but… well. I don't have a dad and she really needs the job. And my mom's a muggleborns, so… she doesn't have much of a job security ."

Harry considered that for a moment, folding his arms. "It's a special sort of _wrong_ when a child's extracurricular activities might be a risk to a parent's job," he murmured.

"Yeah." Marietta murmured. "I don't want to hurt my mum's career or her job, but…  D.S.S. Requirement is something special, isn't it? It's something huge. I… I don't know what to do, captain."

"What does your mother do? She's a clerk – what sort of clerk?" Harry asked.

"It's just filing stuff, I think," Marietta shrugged forlornly. "I'm not really sure."

"Is she… I don't mean this as any sort of insult or jab, or anything, but is she in her dream job? Is being a clerk what she wants to be, is she _loyal_ to the Ministry?" Harry asked thoughtfully.

Marietta blinked. "Huh?"

"If she got a better job offer, would she take it?"

"Maybe?" Marietta said slowly, looking at him worriedly. "Do you… have something in mind, captain?"

"It has been brought to my attention that D.S.S. Requirement is probably going to be a career – a life even – for some people. Unless something happens, this," Harry motioned around them, at the ship. "This is what I'm going to do with my life. As such, we might need… infrastructure, outside the ship, too."

"What, like a company?" Marietta said. "For… what reason? Selling the stuff we make here?"

"Dunno yet; maybe," Harry said with a shrug. "Maybe also for recruiting, for training, and things like that."

"Oh," Marietta said, her eyes widening a bit. "You mean like… _oh_."

"Maybe one day we can tell people about the ship and what we've learned on it, what we can do here," Harry said thoughtfully. "We're pretty sure we could probably manufacture other ships. We're already making spacesuits and things, you know. Doesn't that seem like a good basis for an organisation?"

"A wizarding world space agency," Marietta whispered.

Harry shrugged. "It's a thought."


	9. Chapter 9

The first wizard to spacewalk was actually a witch. It was partly because no one wanted to let the captain of D.S.S. Requirement personally test it himself and partially because she just beat Harry to it, going behind his back to the twins, Hermione and Lee and getting herself fully kitted up before he even knew it.

It was Ginny Weasley. Her spacesuit was in Gryffindor colours – the actual suit was golden yellow, and the armoured plates, of which there were many, were Gryffindor red. The armoured plates, Harry had to admit, made a damn impressive visual. They covered most of the under suit, fitting together like puzzle pieces and sticking to the suit with magnetic locks – it took an actual device to remove them, which ensured that they couldn't be easily knocked off. To Harry's surprise, there was also an armoured helmet that went over the helmet of the spacesuit – it covered the face entirely, hiding her features beneath the faceplate.

"How do you see?" Harry asked, fascinated.

"Cameras, apparently," Ginny shrugged – and though it seemed like the move should've made a lot of noise considering her pauldrons, rerebraces, and breastplate and all the rest of the plates, it didn't. That was because the armour wasn't actually metal.

"We've turned the suit visor into a screen, basically – and there are numerous cameras all along the suit," George explained. "We'll still need to figure out the controls, but eventually people wearing these things will have eyes on the back of their heads and the bottom of their feet."

With Hermione's second generation hover board – which had dozens of micro thrusters along with the electromagnetic cushion, and thus worked in zero gravity – Ginny ventured out of the ship through one of its many airlocks. The whole D.A. was watching, holding their breaths as she carefully set her board on the air lock's so called floor and stepped onto it.

"She has used the board before, right?" Harry said worriedly.

"She's my test pilot," Hermione said. "She knows how to control the board better than I do."

"Fred's suited up just in case though – if she loses control, he can yank her back with an accio," George assured Harry, and indeed Fred was out there – he too in Gryffindor colours, though he had less armouring on.

After getting a thumbs up from Fred, Ginny shifted her foot and activated the hover board and then, carefully, she lifted off the ship's airlock and tentatively pushed out into the emptiness of space.

"Okay," Ginny's voice sounded through the communications which were in build to her helmet and connected to the communications network of the stones. "Whoa, I'm a bit lighter than I thought. Whooa there," she added as the hoverboard very nearly sent her into a spin. "Too much thrust. Okay, I got this."

"Her boots have magnetic clamps, as does the board," Hermione said, her hands white knuckled as she twisted the fabric of her robes in hand. "So it can't fly off. So as long as she stays calm… it should be alright."

It was nerve wrecking to watch. It was also amazing. After a few tentative movements, Ginny grew more confident and added speed, first a little, then more. She tested changing directions and braking, she even made a little summersault – though how that worked in zero gravity, Harry wasn't sure.

Next thing they knew, she was racing along the ship, her delighted laughter echoing through the ship. "I'm probably gonna be sick but this is _amazing_! Whoo-yeah!"

It was unspeakably good to hear her – any of the Weasleys – in such high spirits.

Of course it didn't take long after that until pretty much everyone with any sort of head for weightlessness wanted to have a go. Harry had the twins make suits for every D.A. member, even those who didn't actually want to go into space. After the example from Ginny and Fred, most everyone wanted their suits done in house colours as well – and so Harry redid his suit in Gryffindor red and gold, which was just as well. His original suit had been a prototype and he needed the newer improved version anyway.

"We've made a whole bunch of armour pieces people can choose from, and there are varying different versions," George explained when Harry was selecting his armour. "The light armour can take your usual hexes and jinxes, the medium armour can take curses and the heavy armour can take pretty much all the attack spells we can throw at it. We haven't tried the Unforgivables on them, though."

Harry nodded thoughtfully, examining the selection. The twins had conjured up all the pieces for people to test and choose from before their own final ones would be conjured. The heavy armour ones were, well. _Heavy_. "How do they stand against things like transfiguring?" he asked, weighing the heavy breastplate in his hands. "It's all well and good if they protect from curses but if someone can just transfigure them into butterflies they're not much good."

"You wound me, Captain," George grinned. "Do you think we didn't consider that? There's just enough gold and silver in the materials that you can't transfigure them. You can't charm them; you can't spell them in any way. You can't enchant them either which is a bit of a bother, but… well, at this point they don't need enchantments to make them sturdier anyway."

Harry glanced at him. "So you can't spell gold and silver?" he asked thoughtfully. "I didn't know that."

"It's why they're used as currency. Copper is the same. Noble metals, and whatnot. We got the idea of adding them to the armour from dragon hide – our first idea was to make the armour out of dragon hide, you see, but that was before we got a bit of it under a scan here and figured out why it's so spell resilient," George admitted. "They eat gold, you know, if they can get it, and that gold goes into their cells, into the hide – which is why it's so resilient against spell fire."

"You learn something new every day, huh," Harry answered, weighing the breastplate in his hands. "So, the heavy armour is tested against everything but the Unforgivables?"

"Yep. Powerful cutting curses can scratch the surface materials, and you can scorch them a bit," George said. "But we've got lots and lots of layers on these. Polymers and carbon nanotubes and a lot of stuff we found from the database. The heavy armour ones have bits on them that the spaceship's _hull_ is made out of. Really sturdy stuff. You can throw it into lava and it won't care."

"Hmmm," Harry said and nodded. "Get me heavy armour everything."

"All told, it weighs about thirty pounds," George warned him.

"Then I better start getting used to wearing it sooner rather than later," Harry said determinately.

It was really something to see all of the members of the D.A. in their suits and armour. Some had opted for lighter armour, some for heavier, and on top of that Terry Boot was hurriedly working on adding his cloaking device onto the armour. Lots of them were also kitted out with their own hover boards, which they carried on their backs. And on top of _that_ , Lee and Hermione had moved onto a new project – personal energy shields – which would also be added to the armour.

Gryffindors in scarlet and gold, Ravenclaws in blue and bronze, and Hufflepuffs in yellow and black. They all looked amazing.

"Well," Harry said, as they all arranged themselves in front of him in sort of lines as they all seemed to feel was appropriate, seeing that they were now all in armour. "Now we definitely look like space faring people."

"Can we wear this stuff all the time?" Dennis Creevey asked eagerly. "And can we _keep_ these? This is coolest stuff I've ever owned!"

"Sure you can. Just don't wear the helmets out in the school and wear your robes over it," Harry laughed.

"Actually, speaking of robes, Captain," a voice said behind him and a shadow fell pretty much all over Harry. It took him a moment to realise that someone – Lavender Brown, actually – had thrown robes over his armour.

"What is this?" Harry asked as Lavender and, to Harry's surprise, _Luna Lovegood_ , pretty much dressed him, armour and all, in the robes. They looked like a Gryffindor robes, black on the outside with a red lining. It was easy to tell that they were much bigger than his own robes were – he never would've fit into his own robes in the heavy armour he was laboriously wearing, the shoulders would've been torn right off. There was something else that was different about them, though. They just felt… different. Heavier, thicker, tougher, among other things.

"People who want to wear armour to school will need new robes to fit over the armour," Lavender said, stepping back and looking at Harry thoughtfully before nodding. "And since we're making robes with the conjurator, why not make them a bit… special?"

"What's special about them?" Harry asked worriedly.

Luna hummed softly and hooked the fabric under the robes' deep hood into the back plate of Harry's armour, which held the life support and the power systems of his suit. And so doing, she turned the robes on.

"Ah," Harry said, looking down into the lit up lines that ran along the robes, on the inside of the hood which Luna just tugged up over his helmet, and down along the in seam of the lapels. " _That's_ special."

"It's programmable nanofabric," Lavender said, tugging at her own robes – and the entire lining in them lit up in a golden glow. "You can do pretty much anything you want with it. You can change the colour, the shape… make it spell out rude things in glowing text. You name it."

"Okay," Harry said slowly. "Right. Good."

"Puts a whole new twist on flashing, huh?" Ron commented, and Hermione slapped him on the back of the helmet.

Sadly, for all the amazing things they could do on the ship, they couldn't do everything. Despite the fact that Angelina and her team spent weeks combing through the data base, they couldn't find anything to help Mr. Weasley or Neville's parents there.

"There is medicinal stuff in the database – loads of it," Angelina admitted. "It's just that we can't make heads or tails of it. It's the language, Captain. Healers use Latin and Ancient Greek in their medicinal knowledge and healing spells. The aliens who made this ship, they used their own language for all the things medicinal and we just can't translate it properly. Even if we could, we still probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it."

"Basically, we need a healer to go through the database. One with an intimate knowledge of ancient runes," Zacharias smith said.

Harry frowned, eying the console in front of them, all the ancient runes spread across the glass screens. "So we need a healer," he murmured. "Somehow I doubt Madam Pomfrey would be happy to visit this place…"

Angelina and Zacharias looked at him expectantly as Harry considered the matter.

"Can we conjure this stuff into a book?" Harry asked. "And then give that book to some healer who can figure it out.

"It would take billions of pages," Zacharias said. "Or about a million books with a thousand pages each. There is… really a lot of stuff here."

"Ah," Harry murmured and sighed. "Well, you tried. I'll… figure something out."

Easiest thing would be to recruit a healer somehow. How, though, that was the problem. Though Harry had very tentative plans of somehow turning D.S.S. Requirement and all it entailed into an actual operation, it was so far only a thought. And with Voldemort and the war looming ahead, making the thought into a reality would probably take some time.

Unless he really _did_ start working on it now, despite all the difficulties ahead.

"Well, we kind of planned on starting on a business as quick as we could," Fred admitted when Harry talked it over with those members of the D.A. familiar with the Order of the Phoenix. "We planned to start a joke shop, fresh from school. We've still got the gold you gave us, so… But of course it's different now."

"How do you go about starting a business in the wizarding world?" Hermione asked, looking fascinated.

George shrugged. "You set a shop and just start doing it, I guess. We were going to rent a place in Diagon Alley and just start working. There's not much into it, really."

"But… I thought – aren't there forms you've got to fill? How about taxes, how does that work in wizarding world – I've never figured that out."

The purebloods exchanged looks. "Taxes?" Ron then asked. "What's… taxes?"

While Hermione stared at them in blank, white faced horror, Harry thought about it. If it was really that easy – you just set up shop somewhere and start working, then maybe it wasn't so difficult. Maybe _he_ could rent a place in Diagon Alley, and then hire someone to sit behind a desk and… see if people could be hired for D.S.S. Requirement or something like that. A shop in an eternal state of to-be-opened-soon with a _Now Hiring_ sign perpetually up.

"I guess it sort of makes sense – with magic, things are easier and cheaper in general than they are in the muggle world," Hermione mused to him later, still looking faintly horrified. "I just… how does the Ministry _function_? Where do they get funds for anything, how do they pay their employees?"

"Bribes maybe?" Harry asked, considering the cat sitting on her usual work station. How'd Crookshanks gotten in? "Also isn't there a thing about Gringotts having to pay the Ministry loads of money all the time because of the rebellions or something?"

"Wizards," Hermione muttered, lifting the cat to her lap and petting him distractedly. "I'll never understand wizards."

While Harry talked the process of starting a shop with Fred and George, who'd looked into it, Umbridge made a move at one of the D.A. members. Ginny Weasley – who, despite being so slim and somewhat small in stature had also opted for heavy armour – had been put into detention for not wearing appropriate school attire.

It wasn't exactly a secret that the D.A. members were wearing some interesting gear nowadays – even though the conjured robes could hide the armour, the neck line of the spacesuit was visible past the robes collar more often than not. And of course the armour itself bulked up its wearer a lot – it was blindingly obvious it was there even through the robes. It had been a source of puzzlement and wonder for a while, but as every D.A. member wore their conjured house robes over the armour, no one had seen anything but the collar of the suit.

Not until Umbridge had gone, and torn the robes off Ginny, revealing the armour underneath.

"Right," Harry said when he saw the scar forming on Ginny's hand and the furious look on her face. Umbridge had _confiscated_ the armour and very nearly the spacesuit too – except she hadn't been able to figure out how to remove it. " _Right_. That's enough. Hermione, a word. Ron, call up a meeting – ten minutes, I'll meet everyone on the bridge. We're doing something about this."

They put Terry Boot's invisibility tech to the test that night. Though every member of the D.A. wanted to join the so called mission, Harry only selected six. Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, Cho Chang, Zacharias Smith, Dennis Creevey, and Michael Corner – the fastest members of the D.A. when it came to moving on foot. They were all equipped with the tech cloak and so, all of them invisible to the naked eye, they headed out and invaded Hogwarts.

More specifically, Umbridge's office.

It was almost too easy. With the in-built helmet communications – which couldn't be heard from outside if a person was wearing the armoured helmet – they were all silent. They could pretty much talk as they wanted, and so coordinate the operation without having to resort to whispers. Invisibility made it so they didn't need to sneak around, and even though they couldn't silence themselves, that was no problem as they all had hover boards – which, on the electromagnetic cushion mode, didn't make a _sound_.

The hardest part really was breaking into the actual office, and they got in with a basic alohamora. It was almost embarrassing.

"Find the armour," Harry said, looking around the office in disgust. He'd been there many times and had the scars to prove it. It never stopped being… disgustingly pink.

"What's your view on property damage?" Katie asked darkly.

Harry considered it and then smiled darkly. He wasn't the only one with permanent writing scarred on the back of his hand – every member of the D.A. had at some point felt the Black Quill. They, none of them, had much love for the office. "As much as I'd like to see it, let's not raise unnecessary alarm bells. Just get the armour if it's still there."

It was. Dennis found the stolen armour in a locked trunk. As tempting as it was to blow the whole office to smithereens afterwards, they managed to hold back and after reclaiming the armour, they simply retreated.

The next day, Umbridge was livid and ordered detentions liberally – Ginny got detention for every weekend until the end of school. She didn't attend a single one – she stopped attending Umbridge's lessons entirely. She wasn't the only one.

 A couple days later, a set of articles ran in every magical paper and magazine that could be easily bribed – which was basically _all of them_. Written by Rita Skeeter – whom Hermione could still blackmail into that sort of thing – it was cutting, derisive and rather interestingly written. Sped along by pure, conjured gold, it even made headlines in a couple of the papers.

"MINISTRY HIRES A SEXUAL DEVIANT TO MONITOR HOGWARTS," read one rag magazine, "AN UNDERAGE WITCH FORCED TO STRIP BY MINISTRY INQUISITOR," read another and they even got it into the Daily Prophet – albeit on page twenty eight where it was made a small side article. "MINISTRY INQUISITOR'S DARK SIDE."

The article might've been embellished bit, as was Rita Skeeter's style, but there weren't any lies in it. Umbridge had basically stripped Ginny bare – would've, if she could've figured out how. She'd forced robes off her, stripped her armour and left Ginny standing – in front of her entire class – in what to most would seem like her underwear. The spacesuit was _very_ form fitting, after all.

The day after the article ran, every single female student in Hogwarts refused to attend Professor Umbridge's class – and then of course Umbridge had to dish out detentions to the students to punish them for their rebellion. It had rather the opposite effect than what she was going for, probably.

 The next set of articles after that didn't even need bribes or blackmail to make it to the front page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha.


	10. Chapter 10

Ever since the armour had been perfected, the D.A. had been making protective clothing. George and Fred had made enough of them to fully clothe the entire Order of the Phoenix, probably, using up most of their allotted conjuration credits in their creation. Harry's, Ron, and Ginny's credits had mostly gone to the same purpose, and the very first pieces that had been made – vests, jackets, robes, gloves, and so on – had been send to the Weasleys and to Sirius.

While not as powerful as the heavy armour that worked in conjunction with the spacesuits, the general protective clothing was better than dragon hide in some aspects, being non-flammable and resistant to both magic and physical damage. Though the Order of course demanded to know where the _children_ had got the stuff, none of them revealed the source, not even Harry, who almost daily spoke with Sirius either through the two-way mirror, or the communication stone.

"Does it matter where we got it, so as long as it works?" was all Harry ever said to the demands of explanations, and nothing else.

"We need to know in case the spells in them fail – we need to know how to fix them," Sirius said patiently.

"There _aren't_ any spells in them. Just tell us if they break, we'll happily replace everything. And for Merlin's sake, _wear_ them, please. Don't leave them in the closet until a last minute emergency."

It was hard to tell if they did or if the clothing was any use – the Order still refused to share information with Harry and the others. Even with Mr. Weasley still in stasis with increasingly worse odds of survival, the Order refused to include them. Harry was getting somewhat irritated with the whole thing but couldn't really do anything about.

As it was, though, he had better things to do than fighting a battle he was going to lose.

A week or so after the newspapers had taken the bit of Umbridge's sexual deviancy and ran with it; Umbridge was finally removed from Hogwarts. Students, their parents, their relatives, Hogwarts teachers and eventually even the board of governors demanded her instant removal, and considering that most of the student population had stopped following her orders or going into her classes… Well, her position had become increasingly useless. Even the Inquisitorial Squad had disbanded – probably under the sheer overwhelming power of the rest of the school, now unified against Umbridge.

In the end, the Ministry had to remove her or have the entirety of Hogwarts rebel. And school or not, after the Ministry itself Hogwarts had the greatest concentration of magicians in the entire United Kingdom. Worse yet, Hogwarts wasn't just the students or teachers – it was also the students' families. Two, three hundred students, plus their parents? That was why it was so damn important politically – and so frightening to a politician.

The Ministry put in her place some Auror named Rufus Scrimgeour, who'd taken one look at Umbridge's previous curriculum and, according to the seventh year Ravenclaw-Slytherin class, spent entire hour looking like he wanted to kill himself. Then things changed in the class room. They changed a lot.

It was both terrifying and intensely gratifying. The D.A. members, who'd by now gotten used to the pace of D.S.S. Requirement and Harry's own lessons, flourished under the new intense DADA schedule, absorbing the new spells and knowledge the same way they were absorbed the alien knowledge of the ship. Harry himself enjoyed it greatly – it was somehow very satisfying to finally have a teacher who could actually _teach_ something to him. Scrimgeour might also be a political animal, he too had an agenda to push, but he was one hell of an Auror first and foremost.

"Of course, there is no actual threat currently," Scrimgeour more grimaced than announced to the fifth year Gryffindor-Hufflepuff class. "If there is any threat of _dark wizards_ , then the Ministry knows nothing about it. But there are always criminals and dark creatures about. One should always know how to defend oneself."

It made the actual D.A. lessons a bit of a moot point. Still, that didn't mean that the D.A. simply disbanded. Perhaps they might've, if they'd been just a study group dedicated to learning defence. But they weren't. Instead, Harry shifted the lessons to a… different style. One that incorporated all the benefits and advantages their new, high tech equipment gave them. Including not just the armour, the hover boards _and_ the tech invisibility cloak, but also other gadgets they'd invented.

"You strap it on your arm, activate it, and…" Hermione attached the shield generator on her vambrace and turned it on. It created a shimmering white energy shield, oval in shape which reached way above her head and very nearly reached the floor.

"I thought it would be a fully enveloping shield – like the tech invisibility cloak?" Harry said as he examined the shield. It looked like, well, an actual shield – just made of energy.

"We tested it – it was really too much trouble," Hermione explained, holding the shield up in front of her. "The shield is as hard from the inside as it is form the outside, so you can't cast magic through it. And if we made it thinner to allow magic casting, then it got too weak to stop spells. Plus, the shield can affect the surrounding environment and a fully enveloping shield would make it hard to move and function. With this sort of shield you can move it around and cast magic past it, like so," she demonstrated, shielding herself with one arm, and aiming her wand just past the edge of the shield with other.

"What about your back?" Harry asked. "Your back's pretty open, the shield doesn't cover it."

"Nothing says we can't put a shield generator onto the backplate of your armour," Hermione shrugged and deactivated the shield generator before handing it over.

With increasingly advanced equipment, Harry concentrated the new D.A. training on taking advantage of them, and taking advantage of them _at speed_. Once the shield and the invisibility cloak was fully incorporated into the armour and through it to the spacesuit, it could be controlled verbally. With spoken commands, shielding and invisibility was just a breath away, and it made some very interesting fighting tactics, when combatants could go invisible and visible basically instantaneously.

"Imagine an army with our capabilities," Ron commented, watching how Ginny and Luna, who were easily their best combatants, rushed at each other. Ginny was basically a tank in her heavy armour and heavier shielding – she had a shield generator on her back and both arms, and could if need be bash a person _between_ her shields. Luna had much lighter armour and she incorporated lightning fast use of invisibility and increasingly advanced application of the hoverboard's capabilities and speed in her fighting style. They weren't very well matched at all, and that made watching them fight amazing.

"I am imagining it," Harry answered, frowning. The D.A. – no, the _crew of D.S.S. Requirement_ – weren't actually an army, or any sort of military. They had the abilities and capabilities and were getting better and better at using them… but they were still only students. They'd learned what he'd taught them first to pass a class, next to defend themselves. Not to fight a war. They weren't an army.

But they were _something_.

"Victory!" Ginny cheered after she'd managed to knock Luna off her hoverboard, and out of the ring.

"Bother," Luna sighed. "Invisibility was much more useful before they networked the suits."

"Sore loser," Ginny grinned and held out her hand for Luna. "I can turn off the outlines if you want, though. Give you a fighting chance."

Luna eyed her for a moment. "I believe you're mocking me," she decided and took Ginny's hand, letting the other witch lift her up. "But I will take the offer and then I will proceed to kick you out of the ring."

"Oh, will you now? Well, bring it," Ginny answered. "Helm, turn friend tracking off," she then commanded and got ready to fight – and the second match was in no way less spectacular than the first.

With the personal shield and the energy projects done, Hermione and Lee had moved onto a new project – one that made everyone excited. And perhaps a little intimidated, too.

"Well, it occurred us that we're a bit vulnerable on one point," Hermione explained, when Harry questioned her about it. "The conjurator is an incredibly powerful machine, one we depend on. And we only have the one – granted, its ship wide, but still. If something happens to that, well… we lose it. We lose pretty much everything."

"So you want to make another one," Harry said slowly.

"Well, technically… yes, sir," Lee said. "But not just that. Remember that mining platform we considered making on Jupiter? We want to make it on Neptune instead. Except we don't want to make just a mining platform. We want a space station."

Harry eyed the pair of them levelly. "Oh, only that, huh?" he asked calmly.

"It's just a little space station, Captain," Hermione grinned. "Teeny tiny thing. You won't even see it from Earth."

"You've been around the twins too much," Harry said with a sigh. "Okay, talk me through this space station idea of yours."

Compared to the ship itself, the space station they wanted to make was a relatively simple thing. Or as simple as a space station could be, really. It'd be only one fourth of the spaceship's size, with enough thrusters to maintain orbit and little else. Its main purpose would be mining, refuelling and functioning as a back-up conjurator in case something happened to the ship.

"We have pretty much all the patterns ready and everything," Lee added. "There's like a hundred or so different space station designs in the data base, probably more. This is one of the smaller ones, actually. And all we have to do is get the materials and just start conjuring the thing."

"And we have most of the materials already – the rest we can get from Neptune's moons, if we need more," Hermione added hopefully.

"So… we just press a button and a space station will be… conjured up?"

"Ah, no, it will take about a month or two," Lee said and shrugged. "I mean… it'd be about the size of Gryffindor tower, sir. So… it's not that small, actually. Small in comparison to some of the other space station designs yeah, but… compared to things we've so far made, it's massive,"

"It'd give the ship something to do during summer break," Hermione added.

"Yes, because Merlin forbid we gave Requirement a break," Harry snorted, looking between the two of them. "So, a month or two and all we have to do is press a button?"

"There's a bit of preparations we need to do first, actually – which is why we're asking now rather than, say, the day before holidays start," Lee admitted. "But once everything is set up… it'll be pretty much automated. Yep."

"And once we have it, we can use it to conjure other stuff," Hermione added eagerly. "We're pretty sure the space station's conjuration will be more a powerful one than we have now – I mean, a spaceship is a spaceship, it isn't exactly designed for factory work. The space station would be. And we're pretty sure we could make _spaceships_ with it!"

"Spaceships, sir!" Lee added, wiggling his fingers at Harry. "Personal fighter style spaceships! Spaceships for _everybody_!"

Harry shook his head at them. "Alright, _alright_. If you're confident you can do it and make it work and it won't kill us all… go ahead."

And so the school year was coming to a close. While Harry and the rest of his class wrote their O.W.L's – a lot of Requirement's crew members failing them thanks to all the time sacrificed to the ship rather than to studying – they were all worrying about what would happen to the ship during the summer holidays. Hogwarts was the only way in and out as far as they knew. Though there was a chance that the conjurator technology could be used to transport people even from planet to planet, they hadn't dared to test it. Something about being broken apart into separate atoms and put together again just made wizards nervous.

Without any of their crew on board the ship and none of them present at Hogwarts… summer break wasn't an insignificant amount of time. And Harry couldn't deny that leaving the ship abandoned for that long made him nervous.

"But you'd need to leave, if you wanted to start the organisation," Hermione pointed out. "You can't really do it from here, can you?"

"True. But…" Harry trailed away, scowling. With his luck the Order of the Phoenix would force him to go to the Dursleys' again. That… did not much appeal to him. "No, you're right. And if you program the ship to make the station during the holidays, there's not much I'd be able to do here, isn't there?"

"Well… not really. At least not with the conjurator, it'd be completely engaged. You wouldn't be able to move the ship either, not without ruining the space station," Hermione said and patted his shoulder. "On the brighter side, sir, the tech we've made here isn't magic. So we can use it as much as we want out of school. That includes invisibility."

"That is a brighter side," Harry admitted, but with a sigh. He looked at the conjurator room, which was basically Hermione's and Lee's office now. "If… if I make this a viable thing, if I start an organisation based on this," he said thoughtfully, slowly. "Should I make it military? Like Star Trek?"

Hermione considered that. "I don't know, actually," she said. "Chain of command and all that would make running the ship easier, especially if something dramatic happens. But on other hand… I'm not sure it's necessary. We've already got a chain of command. We've got our captain."

Harry frowned at that. "Is it enough? If we get space stations, if we start making more spaceships – if we start _recruiting_ people…"

"Well," Hermione said thoughtfully, folding her arms. "I suppose a bit of order wouldn't hurt," she admitted, looking at him. "I don't know if military ranks would work for us, but I guess Star Trek might be a good guideline. We've got a captain. There's Lee and me in engineering, sort of. Cho and Marietta are navigation. Angelina and her team do translation… so some of us have jobs already, I guess."

Harry nodded thoughtfully, looking out of the nearby window. Neptune showed just in one corner, a sliver of shining blue. "Would you stick with this, whatever this will be, after Hogwarts?" he asked after a moment.

"Without hesitation," she simply said.

Harry was quiet for a moment, staring at the sliver of Neptune in the window. "Good enough for me," he then said and stood up.

The last meeting of D.S.S. Requirement's crew was held just a couple days before the spring term of 1995 ended. They gathered on the bridge in all their armour, a lot of them watching in fascination the flashes of white light outside the window. Bit by bit the ship's conjuration beams were creating the framework of what would hopefully be a finished space station by the time the fall term started.

"Well, crew," Harry said, once all eyes were on him. "It's been one heck of a year. And I'm confident in saying I'm not the only one who's been… fundamentally changed by all of this," he added, motioning at the ship. "We're different people now. All of us. I don't know if we're better or worse, but we're different."

"Better, sir," Marietta Edgecombe said determinately, with a lot of agreeing murmurs from the rest of the crew. "Definitely better."

"I hope so," Harry nodded. "Now, though, it's about time we close shop here for summer and leave Requirement to its task. Some of us – most of us – will probably be back next term, and we'll see what Requirement has managed to make. But now there is a question concerning those… who aren't coming back as students."

He turned to Lee, the Weasley twins and the rest of the former D.A. members who were graduating. "You guys have a choice now. Whether you come back or find your fortune outside, that's up to you. You're still members of Requirement's crew," he said. "You'd be welcome."

"Hell," Lee said with a snort. "You can't keep me away from here. I'll probably sneak back here couple weeks into summer holidays."

"Hear, hear," Fred agreed with a nod, and everyone else seemed to agree too.

Harry smiled. "Good to hear," he said and looked at everyone. "One last thing. You've all probably heard that I intend to start an organization based on what we've made and discovered here. I haven't yet figured out the details, but I intend to open a store in Diagon Alley and hire someone to man it. The idea is to hopefully use it to recruit new crew members, and advance the operation we've started. It probably won't change things just yet – there's a lot we need to figure out first; hiring policies for one. But it will change things eventually. To that end, I have a bit of home work for you."

He grinned as everyone stood at attention, no one complaining. "We need a chain of command and maybe a ranking system," he said. "We need clearly defined tasks, stations and occupations. I want suggestions on all of the above. Got it? So, essays on a hypothetical rank systems, chain of command, and occupations on board the ship." He considered the crew and then added. "And of course any and all suggestions related to the ship, crew and the future organisation are also welcome. Any questions?"

"Yes, sir. Can we take the things we've made with us back home?" Colin Creevey asked. "The armour and stuff?"

"Yes, and I'd prefer if you wore them as much as possible," Harry said. "The Ministry's official stance is still that Voldemort isn't back. We know better. And I want you _safe_. Hermione and Lee have made spare batteries for each of us to take with us – it should be enough to power everyone's suits through the summer holidays, even if you decided to stay invisible the entire time. And of course, I have an additional gift," Harry said, nodding to Lee.

Unlike last time, no one as much as started when the stack of gold bars appeared before them.

"Five for each member this time, use them wisely," Harry said and looked at everyone steadily for a moment. "I'll see you all next term. Stay safe out there."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and commenting! Until next time :)


End file.
